work in progress

Print Day Eve: Separations, Layers, and Surprises

Tomorrow is the first Osusowake Club print day! I did the color separations today—and finished in just 30 minutes!?

Charlie Yellow

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Print Day Eve: Separations, Layers, and Surprises
It looked perfect in Procreate, but you never really know until you see the actual print—that’s the fun part!

Tomorrow is finally the first print day for Osusowake Club! I’ve reserved a two-hour printing session at the usual spot—Spudnik Press.

So today, I did the color separations for the Christmas tree illustration I finished last week. I guess I’ve gotten used to it, because now I usually have the color plan figured out while I’m drawing. Each layer is just one color and one specific ink density, and I always name the layers with the color and percentage.

Because of that, the color separation only took about 30 minutes today! It felt so fast I was kind of shocked. Like… wait, that’s it?

Those little smiley marks at the top left and right? My husband added them as registration marks last time. Cute, right?

Since I can fit five of these illustrations on one tabloid-size sheet, I arranged them all in Adobe Illustrator with registration marks and cut lines. Then I exported separate PDFs for each color—and that’s it, everything’s ready for tomorrow!

Actually, I have another print session planned for Sunday too, so today I just focused on getting things ready for tomorrow.