I don’t know how many times, in my short carreer as a comic artist, I have heard the question: “are you making these yourself, or are you using the computer?”, where using a computer means that the computer does all the work, and I just stand there and watch. I guess the cause of this assumption is to be traced back to the movies of the fifties, where somebody enters random data into a giant metal wardrobe with many buttons, glowing lamps and magnetic tape spools (also called the computer) which, after an incredibly short time returns the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything.
In real life things are bit more complicated.
In my case it all starts with me preparing the pencils for the inking (as we have seen in the previous installment), and continues with the scanning and pre-print process.
Usually I scan the drawings at 1200 dpi, grayscale. The cyan tint of the pencils turns into a pale grey, which is easily eliminated. The end product will be a page with a resolution of 600dpi, the ink drawing should be clear and clean. Scanning it at such a high resolution I can clean it up and then reduce it to 600dpi without causing unwanted artifacts.
Usually after scanning the page I end up with something like this:
As you can see (or not see, depending of your monitor) the inks are greyish and dirty, and you can see the texture of the paper and the pencils underneath. The next step is to use the “levels” function of the image editing software to get rid of all that unwanted stuff, by “cutting” away most of the luminance spectrum.
I use some pretty agressice settings here to reduce everything to just black and white. I don’t care if the lines look jagged at this stage, that’s why I’m working at 1200dpi!
The end result is some clean and sharp inks. The next step is to reduce them to 600dpi, which will soften the edges a bit, but not make them blurred.
Once I have the page at the desired format and resolution, I add some shadows. I draw these directly on the computer using a tablet.
For Giètz! we didn’t print using black ink. Instead we used a brown Pantone ink. The final effect is that the inks are dark brown and the shadows a lighter tint of the same colour.
This was the last episode of this tutorial series. But don’t worry, I have a lot more to tell you about this project!