#i dont have a scanner so i just take pictures of the sketchbook with my phone

[breathe-2am]

Finished drawing a comic and wanted to scan it, but i dont have a scanner, so i went to staples and scanned it. It was completely blown out, like full white page w the faintest imprints of the darkest sketch bits, so i was like huh weird i must have used the wrong settings. Scanned it five more times, nothing worked, eventually said fuck maybe its the sketchbook thickness throwing off the exposure so i ripped out the page and even that didnt help at all. I asked the employee and she was like yea our scanners r for documents not pencil, id recommend taking a picture on ur phone.

So......

Just spent five dollars, ripped a nice page out of my sketchbook, and got told the better option is using my phone- the exact thing i didnt think looked very good and the reason i went to scan it in the first place.

EDIT: its postedddddd hell yea check it out i have trialed and tribulated for it

[atalienart]

Hello! I was just wondering, when you post your traditional art you dont have a picture taken of your sketchbook. How do you get it to look like it wasn't? Do you have a printer scanner thing? Is it an app? Just really good lighting? I've always wondered how people do this.

I usually scan my drawings because the light is always awful when I take pictures, but either way, I put it into some drawing program (like sai or ps) and I change the brightness and contrast so the drawing looks better (you can even adjust those on your phone). Then I just crop the image and it’s done.

[uniformbravo]

ok so. my day today

basically i spent a long fucking time today trying to Finally get off my ass and scan my traditional drawings so i can post them to my art blog, because like i have been drawing but these days the vast majority of my art is traditional sketches that im too lazy to scan so my art blog never gets updated and i rly want to work on that (i stg some of this shit is literally so old it’s from 2016 but whateverrrrr)

mostly the reason im finally doing this is that i don’t wanna wait too long to post my mp100 shit bc i’ve been drawing a Fucking Lot of that so i have enough to make a few posts now and i wanna get them uploaded while they’re still fresh, u know. the thing is since i was gonna scan those pages i decided it’d be a fun neat idea to scan the entire rest of the sketchbook bc Why Not

well i’ll tell u Why Not, there are several reasons Why Not:

it takes 12 yrs to scan everything because not only are there a shitload of pages but also the sketchbook is too big for the scanner so i have to do some pages 4 times to get all the edges and it’s horrible and bad, legitimately i was standing there for over an hour scanning this book, i put on an hr long video in the bg and got all the way through it and i Still wasn’t done

On Top Of That the scanner is kind of fucking garbage, as scanners are, so i have to take each image into photoshop to edit so they dont look entirely like trash (they still look kind of trashy anyway)

then for the multiple scan pages i have to patch them together so the images are complete / not blurry

then i have to collage all the drawings i want together because a lot of pages are either incomplete or only have like 1 thing i want to show on them so i spend like 100 years trying to arrange everything semi-nicely so that it’s, like, even slightly presentable, Maybe (idk i think the compilations tend to feel really cluttered tbh but Whatever it’s my STYLE), and also i have to take into account tumblr’s formatting so i usually have to make everything fit on a canvas either 540px or 1080px wide (this is even worse for pixel art bc it needs to be exactly 540px to look nice but i digress, we are talking about traditional art here)

so uh yeah that’s my process and Boy is it a Fucking Process

i think im complaining more rn because i have like a year’s worth of sketches im trying to deal with here, like. good god. i spent maybe two and a half hours working on this today (after the first hour of scanning things, just the scanning) and i did not get even halfway through the scans, and that’s just for the photo-editing stage, i haven’t even started putting together the compilations yet

god and like the Other Fucking Piece Of Shit Thing My Scanner Does is it tries to do this Smart Technology Bullshit and decide for itself where the paper ends instead of looking at, like, the actual paper’s boundaries, so even if i line everything up perfectly, a small part of the image fucking always gets cut off and if i were a stronger person i would engage in the full process of scanning the images, taking the flash drive back to my laptop, opening each image one by one to figure out which ones got cut off, going back to the scanner and re-scanning the pages and just repeating the process over and over until everything is in order but as it stands i do not have eighty-five thousand fucking years on my hands nor even a fraction of the mental capacity required to pull that off so we are just going 2 sit down & deal with some cropped images like mature adults

(tbh with all the cons of scanning the art, and there are a Lot of cons, i feel like it would probably make more sense to just take pictures using a camera instead, but on the other hand do not get me started on lighting, focus, unsteady hands, sifting through millions of copies of the same photo trying to determine which one came out the clearest, retaking photos that didn’t work out, back aching from being hunched over the paper for so long trying to get the perfect straight-down angle w/o casting any shadow, etc etc etc)

im just??? honestly, typing all of this out is making me sit back and think why?? why am i even doing this. this is so much goddamn effort for shit that probably won’t get very much attention, which is fine and all but god. jesus christ. im really putting myself through some shit for this

in any case i think i’ll probably be posting some of the more recent stuff first, like all the mp100 shit because like i said i want to post it while it’s still fresh and if i work on this whole project in chronological order u probably won’t see the things i drew this week until like next year hgkdslkdgn