comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Dec. 2012 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Candid photos of men with cigarsDec 12, 2012 11:00 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I meant to have an actual topical blog post but I managed to waste all my time trying to get some interesting color out of a scan of the drawing for today's page, which just didn't seem to want to work for me--so in the end I went back to snapping a photo and working from that, which let me take advantage of the natural light highlight on the paper.
 
I was thinking last week that I couldn't keep doing this photo process unless I got a really nice digital camera--to make them come out a bit sharper and less mungy, you know--but a casual glance at the web site for the local electronics superstore shows me that I could spend a ridiculous amount of money for cameras that have the same or just marginally better or even worse resolution than the little Canon PowerShot ELPH 100 HS I've been using for A* photo duties all along. Huh. Oh well, maybe I'll figure out some tricks for processing them sharper in Photoshop.
 
Here's as far as I got with trying to squeeze colors out of the scanned version...blug:
 
Image
 
The real trouble I'm having with accepting the scanned versions is that the scanner--and I knew this from a previous experiment--does not pick up pencil very well; I think the light is reflecting and speckling off graphite grains or something, but anyway the pencil lines come out pretty gritty looking.
 
Of course what I should be using for line work is a dip pen, aka nib pen or crowquill pen, namely one where you dip a finely forked metal tip into ink and then scratch it along the page, which presses the tines of the tip apart slightly, allowing a little drop of ink to run down the little channel where they separate, and onto the page to form a nice smooth line...but I haven't much liked dip pens the few times I've tried to mess with them; they're messy, prone to breaking (and those needle-like tines can shoot off anywhere! :o), they scratch the heck out of the surface of the paper (often pulling up a little tuft of paper between the tines that you have to remove with your fingers before you can go back to drawing with it), and their blade-like tips only like moving a certain direction across the page, which really puts a damper on how you can draw with 'em, and makes me kill my wrist, because I hate turning the page to draw upside-down just so the quill can move the direction it likes for a given line. Ugh.
 
So if I can get pencil lines to act like pen lines, that'd be swell. My scanner doesn't much care for 'em, though. I've read of professional comic artists who scan their stuff and just adjust the pencils really dark in Photoshop so they look like pen, and appear to be able to do that without the speckly scan problem I'm having... Hm. Oh! Maybe I should scan in black and white rather than grayscale. I'll hafta try that. ... No wait that won't really work 'cause I have a gray wash over it. Oh well maybe I'll try anyway just so I *know*.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Dec. 2012 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy