Scanners, the gods of trad-digital art

[yumehop]

Ever since I found out about scanners my life has been improved drastically. My traditional line art and speech bubbles and what not just don't look the same as my digital stuff.
So I am asking, for those who draft digitally, what stage of drawing do you go up in (be it sketch, panels, line art, inking, or even full on colouring)

What do you scan? (drafts, fully done comics, just line art, etc)
Any need to be known tricks/tips for using a scanner?
Is there anything I should definitely NOT do when using a scanner?

& anything else you have come across while using this finicky piece of technology that might be useful

[skads7]

I do usually scan all my drawings because I do traditional art and I mix it with digital, so... let me tell ya some tips:

• I do the sketches and the lineart by hand (I use Sakuras pens, they´re the best I´ve used ever). The lineart are characters, panels, bubbles... etc (Sometimes I make the panels and the bubbles using photoshop). Make the sketch with a blue pen!
• Scan the linerat, 600 DPI resolution is the best, full color.
• Clean the sketches erasing the blue channel. With "levels" on photoshop you can have a very cleaned lineart.

This is what I usually got doing those things:

Keep in mind 2 important things: First of all, the surface where you do the lineart. The paper is really important! Do not use A4 print paper! And the pens you use Apply those final tips and you´ll get a nice quality scan draw

After that I apply colors and the final result is something like this:

[yumehop]

Wow that's really awesome
I probably won't ever ink any lines ever, but I might end up eventually

What is this 'blue channel'?

[yumehop]

oh wait it's the blue pen. Got it. xD
I might go to blue colouring pencil or something if I use ink.
then again, thank you!

[skads7]

Sorry I´ve not been more specific! By blue channel I mean like you said, all the blue colors on the paper, you can erase then easily by erasing the blue channel on photoshop. [LAYERS][CHANNELS].

And no problem! Anytime!

[thomasfallaeriksen]

Happiness is a clean and scratch free scanner. Mine is called A3 2400S. It can scan in lineart mode and has made life so much easier.
I often scan the pencils, but that is just some optimistic material for my deserted patreon account.
When working with comics I have 3 sizes I work with. One is A4 with 2cm borderswith a working area of 26x17cm. The second is A3 with a working area of 36x24cm. The third is for full bleed pages in roughly A3 size. The paper itself is 40x30cm, and it has a 2,5cm border on the inner and upper edge (like if the page was placed inside a book) and 5cm border on the outer and lower edge. I almost always draw twice as big as I envision the printed page (even though I rarely print anything).
And I do as much as possible on the physical paper. My favourite paper at the moment is Canson's smoothest bristol, but any kind of paper can work fine.
My favourite drawing tools are the G-Pen Zebra nibs. They make really fine and predictable lines and last for ages. I use them for absolutely everything inside the panels. For the panelborders themselves I have an old worn out Hunt 513 nib that I still use for sentimental reasons only. I also try to fix everything that goes wrong with white gouache paint before scanning.

The scanning process itself is pretty straight forward. Just make sure that there aren't any dust from the eraser or anything else on the paper, and just put it inside the machine. I've set the scanners settings to 600dpi and .bmp format. But I usually take it down to 300dpi if it will be printed and when I publish it online.
My scanner is also set to lineart mode, which makes the lines very sharp and clean. And in the lineart mode the scanner doesn't register all of the pencil lines I forgot to erase or ll of the eraser dust I forgot to wipe off. It also makes the cleanup process much easier and coloring much faster.

The coloring is pretty much the same as I would do if it was analog. After cleaning up the scan I duplicate the lineart layer and set the top one to multiply. Then place the base colors and gradients in the bottom layer, and sandwich in a few layers for various shades and highlights.

Regarding things you shouldn't do with the scanner there aren't really much to worry abut. Just don't put any hard or abrassive material in it. We had a public scanner at my previous school that somebody had used to scan sandpaper, steelwool, metal, rocks and who knows what else. Everything I scanned there got the same annoying pattern on it.

[yumehop]

thank you <3 I will remember this for the future

[igneriss]

Tip: be careful with scanner's options. My scanner's 'dust removal' option doesn't remove dust/little scratches/little eraser fragments, but it does remove one character's freckles CX

[SpavVy]

I like to sketch and ink traditionally but I prefer coloring and toning digitally. I hate doing line art digitally because it kills my back x.x plus I don't get the same feel that I like in my traditional line work.

Not sure if this is a tip exactly but I prefer scanning my comic and other art at 600dpi. I heard many printing companies will reject the work if it's under 300 or 500, plus it just makes coloring easier for me.

Also scanning it at black and white works better, the morons that scanned my work at staples before I had a scanner never did this right in the past >.> they always scanned it as color so I had to play with the brightness and contrast a lot -.-'

[zoonland]

I scan lineart. I always scan inked drawings in grayscale mode and then play with levels to balance black and white.
If you ink over blue line, I did a quick tutorial on deviantArt some time ago, hope it's helpful! The tutorial starts with how to turn your pencil into blueline (if you don't want to ink over pencils because you want to keep them separately), but then there is the scanning process.
I scan with a standard resolution of 300 dpi.

[yumehop]

thank you :DDD! I will remember this for next time I scan

[yumehop]

I will check out that tutorial. I don't plan on using a blue pen, so that will be very helpful ^_^

[Starfestival]

I do almost everything on printer paper and then scan it. I hardly to direct digital art.

[isaacfriedman]

I've only just started, but right now I do most of my work traditionally and then go in and do only very minor edits digitally. Prismacolor markers and Micron pens are my two favorite tools (other than my drafting pencil) and I just love being able to feel and see the act of creation in the same space rather than drawing on a tablet and seeing the results up on my screen.

[shazzbaa]

What do you scan? (drafts, fully done comics, just line art, etc)

my process is, uh, A LITTLE COMPLICATED. xD I go back and forth a lot since I use blue lines pretty heavily. This is from my cover banner, but it's the same process I use on my comic!

I'll usually do a very rough sketch on computer to get the composition the way I want it in a form that's easy to alter. Then I edit the whole picture to be cyan blue and print it out, and draw the pencils on top of it! I use basic cardstock for everything, since I gotta be able to run it through my printer (Bristol board is a little too bulky for the printer I have).

But then I scan those pencils in, remove all the cyan from the image, so that I just have the pencil lines, turn THOSE lines blue and print it out again:

(in case you're wondering: a lot of times if there's extra room on the page, I'll just print out a doubled version of the blue lines, in case I mess up and need to start over)
I really love inking. Inking with ballpoint pen is absolutely not the most efficient method, but I just enjoy it so much, and I like the results I get from it, so I do it anyway. xD

Once I've scanned in my inks I'm done with the traditional part of my usual process!

I prefer not to mess with the settings when I scan, since I'd rather do any edits in photoshop, so I just scan the image in full-colour, as--is. Then I fiddle with colour channels to remove the cyan from the picture so that just the inks remain, clean up the inks a little and touch up any mistakes I made digitally, and then do all my colouring in Photoshop!

When I'm doing comic pages a lot of times there's also an extra round of refining the pencil lines, where I scan in rough pencils, add perspective lines in Photoshop, and then print it out blue again and pencil over it again -- but FOR THE MOST PART this is my very back-and-forth process as it stands now! xD

[mg78]

i scan only inked page (if its for comics) or raw sketch (if its for an image/illustration).
min 300dpi.

tips? clean the shield/glass. dirt can do noise on paper...

[jmhenry]

I scan in fully inked pages and handle the clean up, dialogue/sfx, and color digitaly. It's a shame most programs have knocked the ability to import scans.... Clip studio paint came close, but then it wouldn't allow me to turn the scan into pure lineart... To my fellow scanners: Manga Studio EX4 is your friend.

[Kura]

I started out doing the layout, sketching and inking by hand, and just the colouring on the computer, then after a while I moved inking to the computer as well.

Now though it's all done on the computer. My arthritis has just gotten really bad (it's the reason I started slowly moving my art to the computer to begin with) so I can't use a lot of traditional tools anymore (like erasers, as I can no long apply the pressure needed) and the drag from pencil against paper is very harsh on my arm too.

My biggest tip is just honestly keep the thing clean, which is hard to do with cat hair, before moving inking to the computer I would have to scan things multiple times because it would keep picking up the cat hair, and every time I cleaned it up another would show up when I scan again. Aside from that I have no idea how scanners have advanced since I've used them for lineart (last time I need to use them was around 10 years ago) which is really that and past that you need to really care about what it picks up. Sketch and under wasn't going to be seen in my finished art so doesn't mater if I had dust and hair and scratches in it or not.

I usually had the scanning sizes at 300 to 600 dpi

[carloswebcomic]

I just do a really quick rough sketch with pencil, scan it, then do the rest in Manga Studio.

[getsuart]

For comics, I make the storyboard on paper. Easier for me, I can draw it everywhere. And sketches, and some illustrations when i'm bored. one day I wanted to scan my hand because I was bored, then realized I had to clean up the scanner after, so I stayed with drawings.
As my scanner is an old thing, I have troubles to make a proper scan (it makes big pixels and everything). I scan from 300 (for storyboards and tiny sketches) to 600 (illustrations and nice sketches) dpi. I should change it one day. :')