Preparing Color Illustrations for Elizabeth Olds’s Deep Treasure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)

by TRACY BONFITTO, CURATOR OF ART

The exhibition Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds features original illustrations and preparation art that were used in the creation of Olds’s children’s books. These important process materials are on loan from the Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota.

Among these materials is the painting shown above. This key plate illustration was used to prepare pages 24–25 in Olds’s book Deep Treasure for printing. In the archival materials related to Deep Treasure, Olds referred to this spread as the “Prehistoric Page.”

In the published page spread above, the dinosaurs, landscape, and jungle foliage are in color. In the key plate illustration on display, Olds rendered the “Prehistoric Page” in opaque watercolor, crayon, and ink on thick board, but in shades of black, white, and grey. This key plate illustration was crucial for the preparation of the printing plates that would ultimately result in the published color image.

The key plate illustration served as the master “pre-separation,” and it includes all the details and visual information, with the exception of color, to be included in the published image. This illustration was photographed, and a printing plate was created from the photograph.

Separate plates were then created for each color that was used—in this case, blue (cyan), red (magenta), and yellow. Using transparent inks, the areas of color are layered in the finished print, overlapping to result in dimension and variation. To create the three additional plates, Olds prepared three color separations—acetate overlay sheets marked to indicate where different colors should be applied in the finished print.

Three registration marks—on this work, a “bull’s-eye target,” or circle with perpendicular crossed lines—are visible on the key plate illustration. These marks appear in corresponding locations on the three acetate color separation sheets, and were used to align all elements so that the layers of printed color were correctly positioned. Registration marks are printed outside of the area to be trimmed off in the final print, and as a result are not visible in the published book.

On the top right of the board are several of Olds’s notes on colors and percentages. On the lower right of the image, white space has been reserved for printing the text.

To create the plates for each color, Olds first marked the three acetate overlays. In the overlay pictured above, the marked areas are to be printed in blue. Each acetate overlay was then photographed by the publisher and used to create a separate printing plate for each color.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the color separation sheets themselves are not executed in color. Instead, the areas to be printed in the above image in blue, and below in red and yellow, appear in black. The use of black ink makes the visual information on each sheet easier to photograph. It also required Olds to imagine, rather than render, how each color addition would work towards the desired final result.

Two additional overlays—above, for red, and below, for yellow—indicate the areas where each of those colors was to be added.

On each of the overlays, the registration marks that align with the corresponding registration marks on the key plate are visible, at the top left and right and at the lower center.

When the four printed plates were created from photographs of the key plate illustration and each of the three overlays, the plates were then prepared with their respective transparent inks and overprinted on the same surface page. The resulting finished print appears in full color. The published “Prehistoric Page” incorporates the shades of greens, blues, yellows, and reddish browns made possible by Olds’s layering of colors. Visitors are invited to view the “Prehistoric Page” in the copy of the book found on the shelves in the gallery, and to compare it with the other illustrated pages of Deep Treasure.

Although the final illustration is a lithographic print, Olds first drafted the design for the “Prehistoric Page” as a collage, using pieces of brightly colored paper. She used the same collage technique in imaging the cover design for Deep Treasure, as well as several of the book’s other pages. An early cover design and a black-and-white collage study for page 19, with its image of Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas, is on display in the gallery.

For more information on the process of illustrating and printing children’s books, visit the Kerlan Collection’s online exhibition The Making of Picture Book Illustrations: What is Preseparated Art?