Waiting on Godot...
Gender: Female
Location: New Zealand
Rank: Ace Attorney
Joined: Mon Jul 21, 2008 9:23 am
Posts: 2404
You didn't do too badly. I'll give you some pointers on scanning though cause noone talks about it (I had to find out for myself T.T )
OK- I'm not sure how GIMP works, as I use Photoshop CS2, but please, take my advice with a grain of salt- Gimp may not have the feature, or it might call it something different :)
Scanning- Check the resolution that your scanner is scanning at- that's why it's HUGE. Scanning big, and shrinking it is how it's best to be done. I scan my art at 600 or 300 DPI (dots per inch), cause it means that if I want to print them, they're not fuzzy when I print it, and I can always shrink it anyways. If you want to scan and put straight on the net without editing it (No recomended, but if you can't resize, it's a good option), your screens native resolution will be about 72 DPI, so 100DPI will be pretty close. The more dots per inch you have, the more quality you have, so check that. I find if you scan at 300DPI, shrinking it to 25% is about right for the net.
The other thing with scanning is the ther settings. All scanners will ask if you want to scan Black and white, grey scale, or colour. I don't suggest scanning in black and white if you don't know what you're doing, cause it takes all the not pure black areas, and makes them either black or white. Insteed, I suggest grey scale, and then letting GIMP clean up the lineart first before you poke it with colour. If you've coloured it already, Colour is your obvious choice ;)
GIMPing- Remembering that I don't know the options GIMP has, I'll tell you what I do in PS CS2. So, assumng you have a grey scaled picture- it'll likely start off black and grey cause most scanners like to destroy your art in the scanning process (My new scanner is pretty good though- it's an LED one, and the whites come out ALMOST white.... my old one never came out correct >.> ), so what you need to do is make it black and white. If you can adjust levels in GIMP, try that to make your whites white, and your blacks black. If you don't have levels, brightness and contrast would work just as good. Scan high res if you do this though, cause it'll kill off alot of possibly important pixels. You can always shrink it later. Once you have a pic that looks black and white, I'll be honest and say it's not, cause some of the pixels are still near white and near black. If you have an option 'Treshold' in Gimp, that'll make it pure black and white for easy flood fill colouring :) Treshold turns everything above a certain light value to white, and anything below black btw.
Um- If you want to colour it from here, make sure you turn the colour scheme from grey scale to colour (Unless GIMP doesn't have this option, in which case it'll likely default to colour) and go for it :)
Saving- Shrink it down- don't be scared that you're shrinking it 25% of it's original size or more- that's fine. The computer will fill in the missing information for you. It'll make it nice and smooth too if you have the right options selected when shrinking (If GIMP does that? I donno. Don't use Paint to shrink it thoguh. It'll shrink it by pixels, which will make it all rigid). Save it as a JPEG or PNG file after that. PNG is good for flat colours, cause JPEG will mush some colours about and make it look yuck (There's a reason for this- what I mean is like.. in your banner, see how around Phoenix's face isn't a flat colour? JPEG does that to certain colours to make the file size smaller), but JPEG is good if it's filled with lots of colours like a photograph.
That's my 2 cents :) I hope it helps you out with scanning ^^ I know how horrible it is to get things looking nice ^^; I've had countless hours researching to get me a good method I'm happy with XD Lol. Happy drawing!
Last bumped by Justin Laws on Sat Jun 20, 2009 7:41 am.