Zombei Film Festival - Illustrating the illustrations

I am creating a kind of government public service publication with the intent of being handed out to citizens in the event of a coming zombie apocalypse. The publication is fairly illustration heavy, in the style of illustrations from the 1950's and 60's. I have my images and some sketches, so I started taking them into illustrator to work on finalising them.

First off, I got the style sorted for the illustrations, and translated one of my sketches into a final of the right style.

I was really happy with this design, but I quickly realised that most of these publications of the time seemed to be 2 colours plus stock. This was a problem, because mine was a lot of colours and would introduce even more as it went along.

To fit with conventions, I decided to make everything one spot colour, black and stock. This should simplify the design, and make it tie in a bit more to the era. The spot colour I chose is a red equivalent to CMYK of C=31 M=89 Y=80 K=33. 

I then had to experiment with how to edit the picture into these colour restrictions.


zomcolour

After experimenting with this, I started thinking about colours and things like halftone patterns to make shadows without needing another colour.


zomcolour2

After looking at all this, it came to me that I could quite easily get tones of the black to create more interesting images without having to use another colour completely.

In doing this, the problem pretty much solved itself and allowed me to carry on with the illustrations, making sure only to use different levels of the black.