Expert advice made easy: here at Flame Tree we create, design and edit a wide range of calendars, diaries, illustrated books and ebooks. Sometimes we make artwork ourselves, or commission it from artists, or search through picture libraries. However, for classic licenses like Rupert the Bear we have to find the originals ourselves, clear the copyright, scan them and clean them up. We've been doing this for over 20 years.
Rupert Bear has become somewhat of a classic, and has built up a sizeable and rather dedicated following over the years. As a result, many Rupert fans are keen to get their hands on merchandise featuring this wise and thoughtful chap and his host of colourful animal friends. Little do they know, creating these shiny, new products isn't always straightforward and can require some amount of tweaking and cleaning up of the original Rupert images, which were collated into annuals cherished by hoards of children.
I spoke to Jane (Ashley), a designer at Flame Tree and life-long Rupert fan, about how she chooses and cleans up Rupert images ready for use in our Flame Tree calendars and Flame Tree diaries.
1. Choosing the image – Firstly Jane scours through her considerable collection of old Rupert annuals to find an image she thinks might work. She is looking for a good all-round picture which is large enough that it can be wrapped around a diary cover, including the spine, such that for each year the cover image of the calendar and diary are matching. Jane is of course looking for an image where Rupert is clearly the centre of attention, but is accompanied by a decent number of his loyal buddies. In this case she went for the cover of the 1969 annual, and scanned it in ready to start the clean-up work in Photoshop.
We'll be sharing some more techniques and tips over the coming months. Let us know below if you have any areas you'd like covering. Thank you.
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