• Mood: annoyed

don't cartoon on fluorescent paper

Scanning this week's strip turned into quite the two-hour epic. I finished it (if you're wondering what it's about, adding the words "famous for" to the title might help), slapped it onto the scanner and what (to the human eye) looked like subtle opaque shading layers over an almost glowing background came out as an oversaturated mess, the lines burned to blurredness, most of the colours almost black. After trying to use a digital camera instead (couldn't get decent focus) fiddling with the gamma (changed it, but still destroyed the colours), giving it a piece of normal paper for contrast (didn't help, did leave a mark on the original, f*** it) and closing everything down and starting again (it's an old scanner) I gave up and we went out to get food. Cowley road was looking very shiny and got me thinking about the quality that make fluorescent things special, which is that they return a bit more light than everything else. Now, a scanner has a white background, so that some extra light can come back on the bounce-back through whatever you're scanning. Perhaps there was just too much light returning?

I got home, dug out a piece of black card and produced a much better result. But it's still nothing like as good as the orginal. Kids -- don't cartoon on fluorescent paper.