At 10 years old, a year before my Kmart Christmas contest entry, I drew this similar scene for the cover of my school's Holiday activity booklet. This scene might've been inspired by one of the music album covers referenced a year later. You might say I was fresh out of ideas by 11, I might say I was refining my skills. Anyway, like the Kmart illustration, the old reproduction you see below is all that remains—my original is long gone. Again for practice with Affinity Photo, I revitalized this severely aged printout, which I was surprised to discover among my childhood artwork.

Witness the casualty of my reproduced artwork on its last legs. My goal for this salvage was to recover the purple dye formerly in vogue with printing machines of years past and to undo the ravages of time. Miraculously, I saved the entire Holiday booklet which contains 12 pages loaded with drawings, essays, puzzles and poems from erstwhile classmates. If I ever have enough time, I'll retouch the entirety and gift a PDF to these classmates, some of whom are Facebook buddies.

I began with a high res scan. The Green Channel above presented the best possible contrast with which to paint out the "yellow" (represented here as all that mottled grey), essentially painting it to 100% white, while retaining the grey values of the rest of the scan—meaning the drawing itself—no matter how faded. Perhaps not so strangely, a straight up grayscale scan did not provide enough contrast. LAB color space—which separates Luminance from A-Opponent & B-Opponent (two sets of two opposing colors)—was also fruitless. And CMYK separations were less than helpful. Ultimately, the RGB color space offered the best I could hope for.

Even though this is an RGB file and the output will eventually be in color, at this stage it's essentially a greyscale image. Here all the "yellow" has been painted to 100% white, leaving the original faded value of everything else. Minor reconstruction of some elements was necessary including a redraw of portions of the Christmas Tree and sleigh that were missing off the left edge due to bad cropping on the original source.

Finally, with the help of two Adjustments Layers—Recolor and Levels—I was able to match the color of the purple dye as I remember it. Thanks to Affinity Photo, my retouching efforts appear as hot-off-the-press as the printout did eons ago. I can almost smell the alcohol and feel the cool sensation in my fingertips. Can't you?

Composite showing before & after.

To keep this Christmas scene in perpetuity now that I have these two examples from my childhood, my fantasy is reconstructing the Kmart version in 3D. I want to learn Blender (the open source 3D package), I could use my Kmart scene as inspiration for modeling a 3D version of that illustration. I'd want the CG version to look as the illustration does; a kind of cell-style quality to the edges, similar to Disney's 2012 short, "Paperman", but in my case, squiggly marker lines. I'm reminded of the Emperor asking Darth Vader if Luke was corruptible, "Can it be done?"

A year after I drew St. Anselm's Christmas, I illustrated a similar scene for a Kmart children's art contest, and its retouch is also in my Behance portfolio. For comparison, here's both 78 and 79. Left is my original, meaning the source image I started with, and the right is my retouch in Affinity Photo.