Today's work was unseamly

Today I nitpicked at one of the two-page pictures from "The Little Wizard Stories of Oz." The original picture takes up both the left and the right sides of a page, and looks very pretty. But it means that when we scan it, it has this big ol' ugly seam running up the middle of it. Like this:

So I thought if I were lucky, I could just snip out the seam and slide the two pieces together, and no one would notice. But, you see if I do that, the gnomes look all weird and folded up, especially the red one on top.

I spent most of the day painting and repainting and repairing that seam! Then I sharpened the lines and made the final result a little more vibrant. I'm always a little ambivalent about changing the color of Neill's pictures. My guess is they were much brighter in their originals than in print, but we're all now used to the original faded colors. But in the end, I boosted the saturation up just a little bit. Here's the final result!