Some interesting photographic assistance to a cartoonist

It has been a while since I have posted a cartoon, over on meet the people, primarily because I’m travelling. So I don,t have my scanner or access to the myriad things in my normal software in my corel draw and paint tool kit. It was rainy today so I decided to investigate if I could achieve the typical “alvin look” (hand draw, but computer inked) cartoon with a simpler kit. Turns out I could, and it was easy once I assemble the right tools.

I started as usual with a pencil sketch in my sketch book. Then did some basic inking of the main linework. Now the tricky bit, how to scan it and clean it up. Using a camera gives a grey image with poor line definition and uneven illumination. Not the greatest starting point for cartoon. Then I remember a utility that I had reviewed years ago that lets a cameraphone function like a scanner. That system is still around but a quick look on the android app market revealed CamScanner. It worked like a charm, not only doing the basic scanner stuff, you can adjust for perspective, cropping and stretching the image and it will also write to nice compact PDF files.

Then I just used paint.net, a much under-rated general graphics program, to do the colour fill, and linework tidy up. I then did a bit of magic wand selection to cut and paste my characters onto at photo I had taken. Ok it took a lot longer than the 30 minutes I had set myself in the quick pic days, However developing the new technique was fun on a rainy afternoon.


See the final cartoon over in meet the people.

There are a couple of earlier post about my original technique and then the Big Step Forward.

Cropping

One of the very best "enhancement" technique for a new digital photopgrapher(and experienced ones, and film photographer as well) is the simple method of trimming out unnecessary parts of the image, a technique know as cropping.



How you do it is very simple you just selecet a smaller area of the photo, normally using the mouse to drag out or reposition a selection rectangle. The cropping tools in software varies a lot, and here I am using picasa. Even photo kiosk at the photo processor will offer cropping and it can both make an artstic difference (by improving composition) and avoid chopping off peoples heads (when those machines "crop to fit" the usually centralize the portion to display). Some cameras even have a cropping feature. If you have tried you systems cropping tool yet, do an experiment get two of three ok photos and cropp them, print them out and show them around. See how many peope realise they are even the same photo.

Finally a work of warning, remember the size pou want to print, and crop to this size. Good software these days will autoresize your selection box to match that aspect ratio. If there are strong artistic/composition reasons, to go to other sizes remember you will probably have to it print larger and use the scissors on the print