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Tavis indirectly berates CNET et al, and then starts ranting.

So the size I'm looking for pumps the cost up somewhere around 2 or 3 grand for scanners. Shoot. I might be able to find one for just over a grand or so with a similarly sized scanning bed. But is the quality as good? I don't know.

No review seems to care about reproducing original, hand coloured material. I don't give a fuck how good a machine is at digitizing a shiny photograph, a glossy magazine page, or a transparency from someone's lecture. None of that matters to me. They might as well tell me just how useful the box it comes in is when a kid's trying to make a fort in his parents' living room. God damn it. I just want to know how it handles regular fucking paper. How good is it for that? No reviewer seems to know or care. Why would anyone use a scanner on regular paper. Artists wouldn't have a use for that would they?

Fuckers.

I could, I suppose, turn to other artists already working in the digital realm, but most of them are just so intent on using Photoshop to do all their colouring, they don't really need to worry about the type of scanner they end up using. I can't even find a tutorial on how to scan in hand coloured drawings.

Incidentally, I'm pretty unhappy about how widespread painfully obvious computer composed comics have become. Lack of good information on how to transfer hard copy art to the internet is only a mild part of that concern. It's more of an aesthetic issue. Digital lettering, digital colouring, digital inking (or, worse, digital colouring over a just pencils) all stand out from the first moment I see them, and they all suck. I'm sick of them. They're all cold, distanced, and strangely over the top even when they stretch for a more realistic look. And don't get me started on how digitization has led to shoddy reproduction of line work (which is hideously jagged in hardcopy versions of Neotopia, The Amazing Joy Buzzards, and Megatokyo for example) because the creator, publisher, and printers aren't all on the same page. Ugh.

People should be hurt over this stuff. I'm not saying anyone deserves to die, but a few hundred serious drubbings might be appropriate.
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Comments

  1. PROYECTOS8/09/2011 8:18 AM

    Excelent blog!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4/20/2012 11:21 PM

    I got a tablet awhile ago and a sketchbook program to try out digital drawing/coloring. I don't like it as much drawing with a pencil. Maybe it just takes getting used to though, but it feels like more work to me, trying to get the line weights correct, and the size of the lines correct. Plus I never really liked coloring to begin with, and coloring realistically on the computer is tedious...Some digital coloring I see looks good. I think it takes a lot of time to do right.

    The main problem I have w/r/t to a lot of the art I see on my computer (digital or otherwise), is that it just starts to look identical after awhile..I type 'sketches' into tumblr, and scroll through posts, and a lot of them follow the same styles (ex: anime inspired), do the same kinds of studies (spheres, cubes...), copy drawings from the same drawing manuals (Andrew Loomis, George Bridgman), use the same photo reference sites to draw pictures of the same models....

    I suppose it doesn't really matter if your technique is totally original as long the content is your own. Most of the content doesn't seem original to me though...Sometimes I suspect that people are drawing things primarily for the purpose of showing them off on the internet. I might be projecting however. It's hard to tell.

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