Not so much anymore. Lots of artists going digital.

The Japanese sheets were very good quality. American sheets tend to yellow and get brittle with age.

I still have a foot high stack of sheets and hope it is enough to make it to the last page of ADS. That will be the last time I use them.

I was just remembering I bought well over 100 sheets in Japan my first trip and my luggage was WAY heavy. Back in the day before huge penalties for heavy luggage. Each bag was about 75 lbs!

Those aren’t grey. That’s an illusion.

Before computer graphics, in order to get grey onto a black and white line art page, you had to use tone sheets.

If you look very carefully at those toned areas, you will see they are composed of tiny dots. Those tiny dots print cleanly and perfectly using the old photographic printing methods.

The tiny dots are printed on transparent plastic sheets. You cut out each spot you need and the adhesive backing on the sheets sticks to your original art.

Naturally, almost no one uses this method anymore, they use computer tones, which are often not as crisp and attractive, IMHO.

Anyway, when these pages are printed at smaller than the size of the original art, the tiny dots close up and create an optical illusion of true grey.

However, because they are not true grey, there re problems when scanning them from a printed copy.

The tiny dots can create an ugly moire pattern, and get so tight together that you no longer get a clean grey. The image can even turn black.

Also, if there is any dust underneath the sheet, or even a scratch, the old printing methods might not see that, but the computer surely will. You need to go in, blow up the image very large, and pick out the flaws from the tones.

I’ve got one page where the adhesive sort of gummed up under the sheet, and has badly botched a shot of Brent’s face.

Now it might seem daft to use these sheets at all, but a lot of the computer tones don’t look as good. They are flawless when printed, but they have an unattractive airbrushed look. The mechanical sheets, if clean and shot at a high resolution, print beautifully.

‘Nother question from the non-artist: What are the tone sheets you refer to fairly frequently?

Thanks and Happy New Year!

Because hundreds of pages of original art are no longer in my possession, this means I am working from printed copies of the book.

Tone sheets often scan very badly. When converted to scan, they can completely blot out entire figures. There are many specs and marks on them, and on some pages you can’t even see the character’s faces.

This is not just me being nitpicky over commas. These pages must be archived to print the book.

If you don’t want future editions of the book with figures you can’t even see, I need to do this restoration.

Fixing grammatical errors is the easy part. Seriously, it’s usually only about 10 minutes per page. Correcting parts of pictures that simply fell of the page, or badly rendered tones: not so simple.

Sloppiness is tolerated in a webcomic, but unforgiveable in a printed book.