Congratulations to me, I believe I’ve found out why my scanner’s been giving me so much trouble. And wouldn’t you know it, I don’t figure it out until after I find out no one notices a difference in the picture quality. Hooray!
Anyways, I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the problem with my scanner is that my art has improved too much. No, no, don’t run away, I’m not turning egomaniacal, I’m being serious. When I started out drawing my biggest problem was smudged and old paper which I had to clean up and touch up on my computer to make presentable. Over time, I got less sloppy and learned to keep my paper clean and avoid sketchy lines, leaving my comics crisp and clean. It wasn’t until I got new paper that this problem became much more frequent though. My only guess is that my scanner used to think my old comics were junk or something and scanned every single flake of dust on my paper just to make sure it got what I wanted, but now that my drawings are clear and it knows what to pick up, it just goes for that.
To test this out I decided to be less careful than usual with my current comics. I let my hands smudge and dent the paper slightly, I made extra sketchy lines more reminiscent of my older comics, and I did minimal erasing. Sure enough, it became the first comic in over a month to not be scanned with extra contrast and intensity, so I may be onto something. So what does this mean? It means if I draw messy my scanner detects every stray pencil mark and forces me to clean it up, but if I draw nice and clean then my scanner politely ignores the smudges and goes right for the comic and cleans it up for me. This is good right? …right?
Well alas, every silver spoon lines werewolves (or something like that). If you look at my most recent comics you may notice two things. One, things are randomly faded out ever so slightly. This bugs me to no end because sometimes I have to go in and redo darker lines on top of the old ones because the scanner didn’t pick them up. I’m grateful I no longer have to erase things digitally, but now I’m left with random empty spaces. I’ve learned to draw lines thicker to avoid this for the most part, but it bugs me how I have to change my drawing method to meet the demands of my picky scanner.
Second, certain things seem darker. In response to the above problem, I’ve had to make really dark lines. This is especially apparent with things that are shaded in. If I don’t go over shaded in spots like five times and make them a LOT darker than they need to be, then they end up looking like chalky zigzag lines instead of a solid black colour. Having panel edges appear slightly thinner or faded out is one thing, but this looks absolutely hideous.
So in the end, I’ve just replaced one piece of work with more work. The good news is no one seems to mind the scanner’s auto-editing, so I guess you guys are more trustworthy of technology than paranoid ol’ OCD me. And on the plus side, making things darker as I draw them is a lot less work than going over comics and erasing smudges after I draw them. Still, I just don’t like the look of it, so I’ll see what to do. For now, you can rest easy that I have one less thing to rant about, meaning from now on I’ll be forced to blog about something more interesting. Hooray.
This lengthy explanation of useless problems that have no real solution has been brought to you by lolis. Love them.
That is interesting. Anyway to stop it from automatically adjusting itself?
Like I said, the only way I know of is to make a dark mess of paper so the scanner doesn’t know what needs adjusting and makes me do all the work.