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Step 3: Photocopy Your Art or Scan Your Image
(If you don't have a scanner, or don't know how to use one, either find a friend who does, or visit your local Kinko's.)
If you are coloring with markers...
If you wish to color your art by hand using markers, the quickest way to get clean usable lineart is to photocopy your picture. The non-photoblue pencil will not be picked up by the copy machine, so you'll just get your finished lines. Addtionally, they will be in toner instead of ink, which will not run when using water based markers. (We will cover the advantages of toner in a later lesson.)
If you are using markers, but don't have access to a photocopy machine, read on...
Scanning Your Image
IMPORTANT: DPI=Dots Per Inch or PPI=Pixels Per Inch
The actual resolution you should scan at can be limited by your computer's resources. The more powerful your computer, the higher the resolution of images it should be able to handle. As a rough guideline, our artist says that she scans full-sized comic pages (10"x15") at 200dpi, and full-sized pinups (10"x15") at 300dpi. She says the reason she scans comic pages at 200 opposed to 300, is because they'll be reduced in size to 6.67"x10" for print (therefore changing the dpi to 300 to match.), while her pinups are often printed at actual size.
The image to the left was scanned at 200dpi, then reduced to one inch to fit on this screen. (Which means if you printed it at 200dpi, the image would only be one inch wide!)
IMPORTANT: Remember that computer monitors display at 72dpi/ppi.
The downfall of many starting artists is that they assume the size of the image on the screen is the size that the image will be printed at. This is incorrect, and is a wonderful way of screwing up some of your favorite pictures. The size the image displays at has no relation to the print size. (We will get into this more later.) |
