This was one of the earliest character paintings I did for A Distant Soil, and you can feel the 80′s, baby!
You wish you had those pants. You do.
Anyway, this portrait of Dunstan shows him in his home in front of The Wailing Wall, where he invites friends in to perform random acts of graffiti. It’s one of those character back story things that will never be a major point in the book.
I only have about 15 originals on photo-transparency, and this is one of them. My magnificent Epson 10000 XL can handle negatives and transparencies, as well as 16″x 20″ originals. It can also scan up to 12800 dpi!
The photographer took four shots of each painting and each varies wildly in quality. I’ll post some other works so you can see what drives artists crazy: the bizarre deviation from the original to reproduction.
The same photographer took the shots for the cover of A Distant Soil Volume III, which has little resemblance to the original art. It’s an awful reproduction. However, this Dunstan portrait is not bad.
Back in the day, most artists had to hire out for archiving. To make transparencies of less than 2 dozen pieces cost $2000, and you can buy a good scanner for that!
Eventually, I hired people to make computer archives, but alas, since I had no digital skills at the time, I didn’t know how bad the scans were until years later. I opened the discs to find 150 dpi jpgs. Yikes. Very costly and disappointing. Another botch: the Orbiter graphic novel cover. Very vexed.
I lived in a city at the time, but it was not a town where professional artists could get good support services.
I have the original piece. It has a less blue/magenta hue than what’s shown here.
I am not surprised.
I pulled the alternate cover of issue 25 transparencies to scan this week, and all white areas were shot blue. Fortunately, I was able to make a direct scan of the painting a couple of years ago, and won’t use the transparencies after all.
The problem with the cover of Volume III is the photographer provided both a scan on disc and a transparency.
I sent the disc to Image. The photographer scanned the transparency onto disc at only 300 dpi, instead of making a scan directly from the original art. You can’t scan transparencies at low res.
1200 dpi or better, minimum.
At 300 dpi, art looks vibrant on a computer screen, but not in print.
Colleen, I have to say that I have been learning a lot from your stories about scanning and reproduction problems. When I finally get my act together and scan my own art, all this is going to be such a help to me.
But reading about all the things NOT done right… ooooooh, the pain! I do so sympathize.
@ scribbler: Also different machines will give you different quality. Too many folks just get the machine they can afford, and don’t get quality scans. I’ve tried having fans send me scans of my art they have made for me, and they are usually so bad I can’t make any use of them.
Ten years ago, few people had real experience with scanners, or could afford quality machines. So, I was dealing with local copy shops and photographers who were doing the best they knew how.
I once dealt with an old acquaintance who did a very bad job with his basement start up graphics operation. I needed to find real professional services, and he wasn’t it. I pulled all of my work. The royal tantrum that followed was epic. I couldn’t get my art back for some two nerve-wracking years. (I made allusions to this long drama on my old blog some years back.)
And it was doubly ironic, because he owed me thousands of dollars: I had loaned him a small fortune so he could get on his feet. (I am sure that had a lot to do with the ensuing meltdown.)
Anyway, an example of Teh Bad Scan: my Lord of the Rings drawings.
These should be scanned at least 600 dpi greyscale. As TIFF files. Some I have at 1200 dpi.
They were scanned as low as 150-300 dpi COLOR jpgs. The quality was dreadful. In one case, I was presented with a cracked disc of my scans – completely unusable.
I ended up tracking down every single original, buying some back, and rescanning them myself.
The guy had hoped to do all my scans as well as prints for me, but the prints had banding (small lines running through the image) which shows his printer had not been properly calibrated. And because the images were shot as color jpgs, they were not true grey: they printed with little color halos in the images.
To add to the amateur night antics: he didn’t save his settings. He would make 20 prints, and go back later to make 20 more. But the new images would print at a different image area size. You can’t do a run of prints with the image area a different size from print to print! A real mess. I paid for hundreds of these things and had to toss at least half. A total waste.
FYI: you should never archive your art as jpgs. Jpgs are the equivalent of computer photocopies. They lose quality with time.
It’s likely this under-financed entrepreneur simply didn’t know any better, but I had a time extricating myself from that situation.
In places like New York, you would rarely have this problem because there are so many graphics services for artists. But in my old city, that simply wasn’t the case.
Ironically, out here in the middle of nowhere, I have better tools in my little studio than any of the graphics companies in my old town. Moreover, if I need something special done, the nearest city has a large arts community, and I am able to get what I need there.
See? All this useful advice!
I bought my flatbed scanner based on the best information I had at the time, so I’m crossing my fingers on its quality. It was the highest quality I could afford at the time, so I’m cautiously optimistic. I did learn the “don’t archive as jpgs” though. I’d originally had my Christmas card designs scanned as such. They’re sort of okay scans, but… yeah. I’ll be rescanning the pieces.
So thank you for being the fount of information!
Well, these things happened years ago, and I sure learned the hard way! Lots of folks on my old blog really helped me out, especially Justin Kim. Great advice.
But I learn new things all the time, and every client seems to have different needs and standards.
Scanning used to be such a dark art. When I was just starting out as an intern, it was one of my main duties. It was right up there with fetching and making coffee as one of those things needful to the smooth operation of a publications office — if you did it right, no one noticed. But if you did it wrong…
I was lucky enough to start my career back in the early ’90s, just at the transitioning point from paste-up to digital, so I had to learn how to do everything by hand, the old bad way. There’s just no substitute for touching and feeling and seeing how things are printed, if you want to truly understand the process of making a concept into a finished piece of art. I had some fantastic print reps, who wisely took me to their prepress departments and their pressmen as part of my training (and neatly heading off some epic mistakes at the pass). Not that I didn’t make mistakes — in spite of that training, I still did some boneheaded things. Like the 1 a.m. presscheck in which I discovered what happens when you forget to place the high-res TIFFs in your Quark file and thus make plates with RGB JPEGs (hint: only the black plate gets made). Or the 13-page brochure I designed. I ended up buying a lot of peace-offering beer.
If I had a buck for every time I’ve had to explain why color shifts between RGB and CMYK, or why you cannot just magically scale up a 72 ppi RGB image and make a 20-foot poster out of it, I could buy my own island fortress.
@ VT: “dark art” SO TRUE!
I can only get so upset at the people I once hired to do scanning for me. I don’t believe they did anything out of malice, they simply didn’t know any better. The only hard feelings I have are toward the guy who refused to understand that he didn’t know what he was doing, and that I needed to get the job done elsewhere. He was really hard to deal with.
Some people just aren’t very good at facing that they don’t know something.
I have little direct printing experience, and have had problems over the years preparing my art for clients. They have had to walk me step by step through my computer settings. Once it’s done, it’s easy. In the past, I simply didn’t understand what the client wanted.
And since so many clients now require that artists do prepress work on their art, I have had a lot of learning to do over the last couple of years. I worked in this bizz for years and never had to do any of this stuff. Publishers used to have design staff do this.
I have also had problems working with clients who were inexperienced and could not tell me what specs they needed. If I say RGB or CMYK, they don’t know what that means or why it makes a difference. They just want me to start making a picture, and can’t even tell me what it’s for or what size.
I still have tons to learn, but at least I now understand the system enough that a client can tell me what to do, and I now understand what they are asking for.
That said, I have also run into the thorny problem of working with other artists who have outdated software, and who have an extremely limited computer skill set.
I had to replace a letterer whose computer was so old he could not handle 600 dpi color images. Since many comic book publishers use 300 dpi, that’s all he was able to do, and he was so specialized, he knew nothing of his computer outside what his comic book publishers required.
And that said, I know many clients who complain about the high price creators get for their work.
Dudes, we’re not just being paid for the final product, we’re being paid for years of experience, and all the training we have to continually do to keep up with the market.
The production end of design and art is a whole separate beast, and not many people know its intricacies. I think most people genuinely have NO idea that printing on a press is not the same as printing on a color laser printer, just with fancier paper. And yes, publishers used to have design staff to bridge that gap between clients/artists and the pressman.
The letterer with the old computer — oy. That’s just crazytalk.
Not kidding. Was working on an art book, and the letterer simply could not handle the files.
He then downsized my art insisting it would be OK. He could not understand that it was not acceptable.
Lots of people in comics with a baseline skill set, and no ability to work around it.
Again, he wasn’t a bad guy, he simply did not know any better. I paid him a kill fee and someone else got the job.
Because publishers expect artists to do production work now, artists now do a lot more work for even less money.
The really sad thing is all the artists out there trying to break in, and when we run into these production problems, they just don’t understand that sometimes we simply don’t have time to train them, or deal with them. We need it now, and need to hire someone who can deliver quickly. It’s not a case of the evil mean gatekeepers trying to keep out newbies.
Sometimes I can afford to give someone on the job training and sometimes I can’t.