Today I’ve been spending the, now sunny, spring day as a hermit. But I tend to do that anyway 
After my post yesterday, I recieved a message asking how I scan the Hope 7 pages. For those that are interested, this is what I do. Basically, the pages are pencilled on 11″x17″ illustrator board for me to ink over. I use a basic flatbed scanner and scan the pages at 600 dpi line art and then turn them to greyscale and reduce them to 300 dpi. I scan them in two, sometimes three, pieces… depending on how much of the page the penciler used. This is until I can buy an 11″x17″scanner, one can hope . I scan the pages horizontally and place the pieces together as seperate layers, to best align the seperate scanned images into one single page image, in a paint program. I normally use a combination of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Paint Shop Pro. Yeah, I use Photoshop alot, but for the basics, I like using Paint Shop Pro, when it was still done by Jasc. It’s an older version, 6.0, but I feel comfortable with it. Once I have the page scanned, I clean it up, at full size and then I can resize it for whatever page size specifications the printer requires. Always keep in mind bleed for the larger size pages so that you do not cut any important piece of art out if it is printed.
Learning from my past mistakes, I now archive files for the original pencils, the original scanned inked line art at 600dpi and then the final cleaned up grayscale 300dpi inks for every page. You never know when you need to revisit another version of a page.
Ok… back to work for me.
