Before-and-After: Art Education Edition

Well, it's taken a little while to put together this little show-and-tell, because when I first got my hands on the original books in the Art Education Through Religion series, it was in the form of a library bound volume that included all eight books under one cover...and it was so tightly sewn that I really struggled to scan the pages inside.  (Thankfully part of our arsenal of tools in reproducing these older treasures is a large-format scanner with a platen that comes all the way to the edge...this means that we are able to carefully scan books up to 12.5" x 18" without damaging the spine!)

So I didn't have a satisfactory specimen for our "before" photos...until a generous reader offered to let us borrow the one she found at a thrift store (Hat tip to Erin!)!

So here are some before-and-after photos of Book Three in the series, which display the state of the originals...great content, but poor print quality, badly browned paper, and unappealing, muddy grey images. The combination of these characteristics made it nearly impossible to reproduce as-is...they needed help.

It took us around two years...Some pages were colorized, others carefully redrawn in Adobe Illustrator...and some simply cleaned up to remove the haze and flecks from the paper background and restored to fill in for deteriorated ink coverage.

Here you can see the covers.  The originals were all red, but we felt this made it difficult to differentiate between the various levels, so we chose to introduce a theme color to each level, starting with the original red and working our way through the rainbow (because no one can steal the rainbow from God...it remains the beautiful symbol of His promise!).  So on top here you actually see the cover of Book One...and Book Three has a yellow cover.

The inside of each cover in the series features a different verse with a black-and-white art background that form part of the instruction at each grade level...

And the interior pages have varied illustrations which we either redrew or colorized to make them more appealing:

And last but not least, there's the back cover, where we replaced the original publisher's logo with our new art logo...

The books in this series were a labor of love and we hope they will go far in revitalizing the teaching of this subject in the Catholic sphere!  Please help spread the word!