The drawings were divided into several basic groups: characters; props; scenery in the foreground, and background scenery. All of these started life as black and white drawings made by Edward on paper with a felt pen or with brush and ink. The drawings had a wonderful 1950s quality to them so we used that as our basic theme. Colors were selected from American advertising at that time and also from Soviet posters. A palette of colors was created in Photoshop and that palette replaced the main photoshop palette and was used by all of the colorists on the movie.
The backgrounds were fairly straight forward. The sky was sometimes removed and the drawings were colored by using the paint bucket tool.
The characters were the most difficult as they had to move and act.
Usually Edward would supply us with a sort of exploded drawing of the character (along with a drawing that showed how it all went together) The drawing would be black lines on white paper and scanned into the computer at 300 dpi. Once in photoshop the black lines were examined for any holes and the holes were filled with the paint brush tool. (an important step as otherwise the color sort of leaks out all over the page) Once this step was done each part of the character was cut out with the polygon lasso tool and placed on it's own layer and labeled. Then it was a matter of selecting the area we didn't want on each piece with the magic wand tool and deleting it. This left us with a black and white version of the character completely cut out.
Each layer was then colored using the paint bucket tool set for a high tolerance (50 or so) and clicking inside the area we wanted to fill. For stubborn small areas the paint brush set to darken was used. Usually the character was divided as follows: one or more heads, chest and neck area, abdomen, left and right upper legs, lower legs, upper arms, lower arms, hands, and shoes.
It is very important to add some overlap to all the pieces so that when rotated a gap does not show. A typical example of this would be to extend the neck and round off the top so that when the head is placed on top of it and rotated to various positions the neck shows underneath.
