The Concept Guys

Continuing with images from my YouTube video: Here's the image that The Badass was done for. It's three silhouettes representing different genres of ideas I've done plots for. The Badass represents crime comics. The other two guys represent fantasy and superhero concepts I have and are references to specific unpublished characters I've created.

This being the first art I'd done in years, I kept it as simple as possible, with silhouettes against a sunset...

The Badass

So they'll be no finished page until Wednesday or Thursday. In the meantime, I'll be posting some art, starting with some from my Introduction Video on YouTube. A lot of images appeared in there that either look cool or have a lot of history (or both).

This is one of them. I call him The Badass. I drew him for an image representing the different genres for concepts I've done plots for (and sometimes drawn penciled comics of). I've plotted some more grounded types of sci-fi concepts involving crime, and wanted that to be represented. I went with an assassin/enforcer type character, since I felt that would be immediately recognizable, even in shadow.

He was one of the first things I'd drawn in years and I didn't realize inking him with a normal pen wouldn't work well once he was scanned and colored in Photoshop. The lines weren't dark enough and confused the paint bucket and the image you see is what I got. It looked so cool I just kept it that way after turning the lines white.

He doesn't represent any specific character I've created, but he looks so cool I might come up a story up for him. Or if I ever do crime noir comics, he could be my cover corner box image.

Social Media on Parade: There's no tube like a YouTube...

YouTube! Somewhere between the videos of kittens nodding off and Mitt Romney dancing Gangnam Style is a channel for College Follies! I've only got one video so far, an introduction to this blog, but more will be coming. I'll be posting videos on how I make the comic and other fun stuff along the way, so be sure to subscribe to the channel.

Putting art on a YouTube channel...well, let's just say it's complicated. You remember how Google+ initially shows the bottom of your image to browsers who visit your site? Well, YouTube will only show a small slither in the very center to visitors.... or at least the ones on the internet. It'll show a different slither to mobile users and the whole image to those seeing it on their TV.

So to find an image that would look good  no matter what, I used a picture from a photo shoot  I did of pages I'd drawn or inked with art supplies and/or other images I'd made laid on top of them. These photos are used for the background for this blog and the College Follies Twitter page. I was able to find one that would make sense when viewed only as a middle slither (you could actually see characters' faces, tell what was going in the panels, etc.). And you can also see the pen and pencil on top of the pages that just screams "comic creation" to me.

Incidentally, the inked pages shown are from the story I'm touching up, lettering  and coloring currently (though they are a few pages farther than what I've gotten to so far). The penciled one in the middle is from a incomplete story I drew in 2000, which will be the second College Follies story. How's that for a tease?

The Cover, Part 2: Me vs Pixelization

The original cover, as printed, back in 2000.

So the original version of the first issue, of which only a few dozen copies were produced at a local print shop, didn't print well. The line art ended up looking squiggly (like something out of Dr. Katz), probably from bad compression or low resolution.

This was back in the year 2000, when it was a challenge working with and storing files big enough for print and I didn't know what I was doing. Back then I had to fit all my art class projects on a zip disk that held 100 megabytes. Nowadays I have single projects that are 100 megabytes a piece. The technology has made quantum leaps, so big files are no problem now.

So when I redid the cover, like the rest of the comic, it needed to be rescanned from the original inks. I scanned in the printed comic too to pull the lettering from, since the lettering turned out okay in the comic. So all I had to do was scan in the cover, pull the word balloons and text, slap them together, add color and call it a day. Simple, no?

Well, I went through the entire process and produced a final PDF. I then double checked Comixology's submission guidelines to see if I got the size exactly right. I ended up stumbling on a bit on there that pages should not look pixelated if you zoom in to 300 percent. As I was working on it, I only viewed the cover in the size that matched how big Comixology's comics were on my computer. It never occurred to me to zoom in THAT much.

So I did...and the text was a bit pixelated. Well, ok, I'll just redo it and type the text, no big deal. But then I noticed the line art was slightly pixelated. Everything was scanned in at 300 dpi. That's print resolution. That's the resolution Comixology used in its examples. And it's...pixelated.

So at this, point I fight the urge to assume the fetal position, and again look up how to scan comic art online. I found most people recommended scanning it in at least 600 dpi. One guy suggested 1200 dpi, but my scanner crashed when I did that, so I decided 600 would be good enough.

It looked great, but then I tested it after I did background removal. You see, the scanner will get the texture of the paper, any left over pencils, etc. along with the inks so you got to get rid of that junk. One way is to scan it as text or line art, which ends up with a very poor image on my scanner. You can also try turning into a bitmap or using threshold in Photoshop but that also seemed to down the quality.

So I've been trying a technique where you select the black ink with the magic wand (by turning contiguous off, so it selects all the black, and anti-aliased off, so it gets the tightest line selection possible). Then you color those selected lines with default black (because they scan in faded and need to be darkened  up). Then I "select inverse" and  hit delete to get ride of all the background junk...and boom! All I got left is black lines and white background. This technique has created some nice looking art I've been using on my social media sites.

So I tried this technique on the cover at 600 dpi and then tested the image, busting it back down to 300 dpi as a pdf. It was better, but I could still see the jagged pixels at 300 percent. So I fumbled around for a couple hours trying different things when I found an option on the wand that lets me "refine edge." I tried it and...voila, smooth lines at 300 percent!

So at long last I think I have an effective way to scan the art work in that'll meet Comixology's criteria (and also give me high quality line art if I ever get it printed again). Hopefully, with a bit of fine tuning, this will work for the rest of the pages.