#745 Spectators

Amelius on Sept. 16, 2008

I was going to update this Monday, but the power went out! I got to see some colorful lights in the sky as some of the power lines got blown around in a windstorm though. It's pretty freaky!

I did something quite different for today's page, and I'll let youse in on it. I drew the last panel a little large when I drew it on the computer paper, so I had to sort of “assemble” this one on the computer from a few other pages of art ( there were pieces of other art for future pages on this page too) thanks to the haphazard way I'm drawing lately. Why am I drawing haphazardly? ‘cus that’s the way I used to do it, and I got stuff done quicker that way. That means I'm trying to finish the storyarc finally!
Anyway, I assembled the art in photoshop and decided to color this page by hand, so I printed it off on computer paper. I did this for a few other pages as well since either A. the original page they were drawn on was damaged/ruined or B. one panel was badly drawn and needed to be replaced.
But when I used my new printer and asked it to kindly “bleed” the page (as in a borderless print without those stupid margins that they won't let me adjust, grrrr!)but it whined about not printing good on plain paper and requiring expensive paper to be loaded in and I said “shutup! Print it on the computer paper and LIKE IT!” but instead of stark, black outlines for me to color I ended up with a faded, warm shade of grey and I was quite perplexed, I didn't want to waste ink printing it again but I wasn't sure how it would turn out without the black outlines. If I made a mistake or colored out of the lines, I knew it would look like crap. It surprised me in looking better than I would have imagined, but it was still a major pain and I scanned this in at least 5 times due to rampant perfectionism, because I kept noticing things I “should have done” before I could commit to putting text on it. It seems I never notice this stuff until I'm staring at it onscreen, probably because I need to do everything I can to compensate for the crapification that happens when you scan in artwork that's colored by hand like this. A good point of advice I can offer though to those of you with scanners and photoshop: adjusting the exposure can help a LOT, when blacks all fade to grey you should slide the “gamma” back a little and it'll darken them back up again. It darkens the rest of course but it's not so noticeable.

Dumb random fact: Yesterday, Firefox told me I misspelled “you”. It was spelled exactly as you see it. I's nevar trussting yuo agan, Fir3fox spellchek!