No, Please, I'll Do Anything But Write ...

[rowyn]

In my perennial quest to put off working on my novel (though I did write 543 words today on it anyway, nyah. 4000 more words this month and then I finally get a break. Phew.) I did this sketch of an anthropomorphized okapi, which I'll hide behind a cut tag 'cause she's not wearing any clothing. (Though she's tastefully covered in fur.) I'm not going to say anything about the quality of the sketch except that it looked better before I scanned it in. For one brief shining moment in 2002, the stars were aligned and I had everything on my scanner set just right to do decent scans of pencil drawings. genesis_w, what'm I doing wrong now?

The pose is shamelessly stolen from this painting by Eugene de Blaas (warning, she's also nekkid and has no fur to cover her, either). As for why an okapi, well, it's all ursulav's fault. I was looking through her webpage and she had done this cute pictures of an okapi, and, gosh, the fur pattern is really neat on 'em.

Comments

[gen.livejournal.com]

I usually have to tweak things in photoshop to get the scan just right, usually by teling it to darken the lines and such. Are you scanning in color or grays? You might be able to squeze out more detail by doing it in color or increasing the dpi... of course, your scanner might be croaking as well :P

[rowyn]

I scanned it in greys. Scanning it in color made it worse. I think I must've clicked on the wrong feature or something, because it was better on my first attempt (though still off) and then it just went wacko on the next. I fiddled with a whole bunch of stuff just to get this far, and what annoys me about it is how grainy it came out. I didn't have that problem with this picture: http://home.kc.rr.com/rowyn/sketches/intense.jpg -- I'm not sure why I'm having it now. Bleah.

[gen.livejournal.com]

Are you using a different pencil perhaps? Sometimes there's just some shades that don't scan. Only other thing I can think of is cranking up the contrast a bit.

[rowyn]

Nope, same pencil ... and I've got the contrast cranked to maximum already. :/ Thanks, though. :) Maybe my scanner is just dying.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Looks pretty good! Arms might be a bit short, but by and large you have the figure down quite nicely. As for pencils, I would suggest using the curves tool in Photoshop, if you have that, to better define it.

[rowyn]

I don't have Photoshop. I've got Corel Photopaint, which may have something similar, but I'm not sure what the thing you're refering to does. :) I never got very good at using Photopaint, really. Took me ages just to figure out just the very basics of objects and masks.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Basically, the curves tool gives you a line from 0,0 to 256,256, meaning that anything at a darkness of 0 will be converted to a darkness of 0 after applying the curves tool, and so on. Then you can push and pull the line -- it tries to make it a spline curve so it'll be smoothed -- until it leaves your picture nicely dark where you want it to be dark, and white where you want it to be white.

Typically, I'll make it an S-shaped curve with the lower and upper ends of the S pressed against the bottom and top respectively to have pure white and black; the sloping part will be more steep and narrow if I am scanning an ink picture, to create almost pure B&W, and about a 60-degree diagonal if I'm doing grayscale.

You could also, for instance, flip the curve to be 256,0 to 0,256 to make it invert black and white, for some striking effects.

[rowyn]

>.<

I think I need to see this in action. I'm not parsing it from the description. I *think* my Corel scan utility does something like this, but I couldn't figure out exactly what it was doing. But it involved curves, numbers ranging from 0 to 256 in various places, and it made things darker and lighter in some way that didn't quite click in my mind. (You know how you can see *something* is happening, but you don't know exactly why, or what will happen if you tweak another setting? That effect.)