Scanning
| Tools | The Idea | Penciling | Inking | Scanning / Touch Up | Lettering | Finishing Up |
The scanner I use is a HP Scanjet 4C. It has served me well for years and I have not had a day of trouble with it. I do my scans as black and white drawings at a resolution of 300 DPI. This makes the image about the size of the roof on my Ford Explorer. It makes use of the old adage “It’s better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.”
And of course I close the cover before scanning. This was just for the benefit of the picture.
As you can see here, the image is too big to fit on my screen, so I just do any touchups I need to do (I rarely need to touch the strip up). Once done, I zoom out to fit it in the screen and then save it as a .TIF file.
Now for one of my favorite tips. I load the image into a program called Adobe Streamline and convert it. What this does it take the original pixel based .TIF image and convert it into a vector graphic. Basically what this means is that I can scale my drawing from the size of a postage stamp up to as big as a building and it will still remain crisp and clean.
The reason this is better than using a .TIF or .GIF file is that when pixels are scaled down, they compress down fairly nicely. But when a pixel based image is enlarged, it just becomes bigger pixels (basically big squares). The vector drawing uses reference points and draws a line between them. All of the information is then encoded into these points. Length of the line, angle, curvature, etc. So no matter how large or small the image size, a 45 degree line with a 32% curvature will always be just that, only larger or smaller.
Plus, another benefit of using vector graphics is the smaller file size. One of my strips at 300 DPI can easily create a 1 meg .TIF file. The .AI or .EPS file I create with the vectors are about 100 KB. A ten to one ratio. This helps immensely in archiving the graphics.
I’ve taken a screen shot showing an extreme close up of Dante’s cigarette to the right.
Once the file is converted to vectors, I open it up in Adobe Illustrator. As I said earlier, I hate drawing the boxes, so I have created a handy template for me to drop on top of my image. It works wonderfully and maintains a nice consistent look and feel to the strip. One addition you can’t see is a block of white that is just a bit larger than the boxes. I select this block and “send to back” to give my strip a white background when importing into PhotoShop later.
Lastly, I position the frame, lock it down, and delete the reference points. Usually they can’t be seen, but I’m just anal that way. And don’t forget to save often.
The strip is now ready for the next step.
