Make Comics Not Excuses

Hey everyone! Long time no tutorial! So let’s ease back in with a common problem a lot of new comic book artists have:  How do you scan a 11″ x 17″ piece of art?  Most comic book art boards are 11″ x 17″ however most scanners will only scan 9″ x 12.” This can be a problem. So allow me to show you how to scan in large pieces of artwork with a standard scanner, and make it look like you scanned it all at once.

I’ll be using photoshop CS3 in this example.  Other art software will probably work in a similar way, if not the exact same way.

Step 1: Scan the art.

Scan the top half and the bottom half sideways in your scanner. They’ll look something like this:

 

Step 2: Rotate the art.

This can be done simply in photoshop with the top tool bar. Go to IMAGE->ROTATE CANVAS-> 90 DEGREES CW or 90 DEGREES CCW as the artwork requires. CW stands for “Clock Wise”  CCW stands for “Counter Clock Wise.”:

 

Once rotated, your artwork will look like this:

 

 

Notice how the top half and bottom half have common panels. This will become important later.

Step 3: Change canvas size.

We need to combine these two halves. First we have to make room.  We need to change the canvas size of the top half to be large enough to include the bottom half. We do this by going to IMAGE -> CANVAS SIZE.

 

A window will pop up. In that window make sure you anchor the page to the top. Then adjust the hight of the page to be 17 inches:

It’s important to make sure you anchor the page to the top, or else the extra  height will be added to the top and bottom of the page. We don’t want this. We want the extra inches to be added to the bottom only.

It’ll look like this:

Step 4:  Combine the two halves.

Now that we have the room. Let’s combine the top and bottom!

You can do this by either dragging the bottom half onto of the top half. Or by pressing COMMAND/CONTROL A, then COMMAND/CONTROL C on the bottom half. Then pressing COMMAND/CONTROL V on the top half.

It’ll look like this:

 

Notice how our top and bottom are now combined, but they’re not quite lined up.

Step 5: Line up the halves.

Because the top half and bottom half have some common panels, we will use them to line up the art.  So first you have to make the bottom half (which currently is the top layer) transparent.  You can do this in the LAYERS window. Click on the OPACITY and lower it:

I like to make the opacity somewhere between 30% and 40%. Once you can see through the top layer. Line up the art so it looks like this:

Step 6: Make it Seamless

Once the two halves are lined up, return the opacity of the top layer to 100%. You’ll now notice that there’s a slight problem with the art:

Do you see that dark bar where the halves overlap? This happens where the page was hanging off the edge of the scanner. It’s easy to get rid of though. Since the top half and bottom half both have a common panel, I can simply erase the top layer until that dark bar disappears and it all blends together.

So use the erase tool:

And erase the top layer until it looks like this:

BAM! Looks like one solid piece of art doesn’t it? No one has to know it was two different scans!

At this point we can flatten the art, adjust it’s levels, get rid of the blue line and/or clean up the artwork. But those are tutorials for another day.

I hope that helps everyone working on larger comic boards! If you have any follow up questions or want to request a tutorial, let me know! Leave me a comment here and I’ll  get it up on my blog schedule!

Tomorrow we’ll have page 17 or Shadows of Oblivion #3. But in the mean time:

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And remember: Make Comics! Not Excuses!