Arrrgh! Anyone have any experience with word balloons? Willow’s inking the pages of Violet Miranda #2, and I foolishly offered to start scanning the art, and creating and placing the word balloons on each page. Turns out this isn’t as easy as you’d think if you want your comic to look halfway decent. Last issue, Kiss Machine’s designer Matt B did it for us and it was pure torture. We had the bright idea to spare him this time ’round. Lucky Matt.
First off, line drawings have to be scanned in monotone (black) and kept as vector images, which basically means working in Illustrator, I think. Then you have to add the balloons (also vector images) and text on top, and hope to hell that when you save the file you’re working on in another format, it won’t suddenly turn out to be all pixelated. We were trying to use Willow’s handdrawn balloons, but that wasn’t working too well because they’re hard to resize. Now, we’re more or less following these guidelines. Slow going…
Are you actually scanning into Illustrator? I have been told this is not a good idea by my teachers, but I have no actual experience with it. They say that handdrawn stuff can’t be saved as vector so you have to scan it in bitmap (photoshop). It would make sense, because my friend has that program where you somehow translate line drawings into vector. The program is not illustrator or Indesign. I don’t know. I think we should figure this out so we don’t make any mistakes. xo.
Comment by willow — July 26, 2005 @ 3:09 pm
Ok. For anyone else reading this, these two comments (this one and the previous one) probably seem a little disjointed. This is because they were from an e-mail conversation Em and I were having about the very same topic, so her cmments that go in between are missing.
Also, I just want to say, I am no expert!!! So if anyone has any comments or corrections for me, please pipe up!! Yay! Thanks all!
The vector and bitmap thingy is confusing, but it’s easy if you can think of it this way,
-Vector translates lines and objects into mathematical equations (aka Bezier Curves) so that when you enlarge or reduce an item, it retains it’s shape precicely and without any distortion (smooth curves not dots). This is why the program is so good for text. But you need a separate program in order to translate hand drawn line art into bezier curves. Illustrator and InDesign are Vector based programs. –Not sure about Quark but I would assume it’s in this category, too.
-Bitmap is exactly as it sounds… a map of bits or dots. Dpi is used here (not in vector based programs) as a way of controlling the quality of the work for when you enlarge it. If you make something smaller than the size you plan on outputting it, you would scan it at a really high dpi. Billboards, for instance, are scanned in at something like 1200 dpi. But if you scan something that’s bigger than the size you plan on printing it, there’s really no need to scan it higher than about 300dpi (standard print resolution). When you reduce it, the dots become smaller and the image gets sharper. Photoshop is bitmap.
You can scan art into bitmap programs because it can read what’s in each dot separately. I don’t think you can scan into vector based programs because it would have to read everything as a whole and then somehow divide everything up into mathematical curves. I don’t know that Illustrator or InDesign are that sophisticated yet. And if they were to make them like that, I think they would probably become HUGE programs. It seems like that would be a lot of information, but definitely coming in the near future, I would assume.
wxo.
Comment by willow — July 26, 2005 @ 3:20 pm
Hey Willow
No, I’m scanning into Photoshop, not converting the files at all and opening them in Illustrator. So far, so good.
Comment by Emily — July 26, 2005 @ 3:27 pm