Considerations digitizing traditional webcomic?

[New_To_Comics]

So I know this is probably thinking like ten steps ahead of what I should be focusing on, but I figured it might impact my work. I'm looking to draw a comic of like, 2 pages max, just so I don't start a sprawling epic and get dissuaded or something. And while I'm not doing it for an audience, for my own sake I want to feel like it looks as good as it could be. So my question is, given the limitations of working traditionally, what is the best way to go about that? Are there spaces where you can scan in work? How do I make sure it's readable?

My current tools is pencil, brush, ink, dip pen, possibly acrylic paint and white gel pen.

[kyupol]

I used to draw, ink, then scan inked lineart then color in photoshop.

Or... if it's gonna be completely traditionally drawn, just scan, adjust colors a little (hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc), then do dialog balloons and that's it.

This one for example, I used colored pencils for the most part.

Then enhanced colors in photoshop... added the hilites, wings, and glowing sword fx. Those are obviously digital.

[KevinReijnders]

If you don't have a scanner yourself, a local library might have the service available to you (likely for a moderate fee)

As for settings for the scan, I recommend a high DPI for higher quality scan. Other than that, make sure to scan in color and in the "photo" setting for better colors.

Save it as an image file.

Resize for tapas and save those as a copy.

[Caro]

I’ve never really thought of working traditionally as any sort of limitation. The biggest limitation to me I guess is whenever I move and I have to take bins and bins of pages and having the space to house my original pages but it always works out.

I’ve been drawing my comics traditionally for a really long time time and in a professional capacity for about a decade and the way I work has not changed. I always use a pretty cheap scanner. A high quality scanner isn’t going to make a huge difference and all that matters is that I can scan 300 and occasionally 600 DPI which most home scanners do. One of my last scanners I used was just a cheapo $30 one from Facebook Marketplace.

My scans look like this before anything else:

I use non-photo blue pencil because it saves the time of erasing and messing with brightness and contrast and it is extremely easy to drop out in two seconds on Photoshop. Then I fix my black and whites with a couple more tools. I have an action set up in Photoshop where it just does all these steps for me in a couple seconds. And when that’s done my scans look like this:

And then I start coloring which for my comics I just like the way they look colored flat so I don’t do a lot of coloring tomfoolery and I secretly just bucket fill everything…. Its not the best but nobody has complained so far! By the end of the process I think they look relatively presentable.

I wish I had just one file I had every step saved with but as I am on my phone I just have whatever art I have on hand. I do use photoshop but I know a lot of the same tools I use are on free software that I will probably be switching to and learning how to use eventually!

[New_To_Comics]

This is so very helpful! I'm glad it doesn't seem a limitation! I read so much about digital being so much easier to upload and all and I've never done comics so I assumed it must be easier. Non-photoblue still works? I thought it would be picked up by scanner/printer nowadays

[Caro]

Scanners do pick it up but the tool to drop it out of scans takes less than a second with zero fiddling so a lot of people still use it and like it.

[New_To_Comics]

I just discovered a store that stores them!!! Hyped!