Part 3- The Big One
Okay, today is the final step- the digital world!

This post is 15 screenshots at 1680X1050. Not for the faint of heart (or tiny of monitor). It is also the nitty gritty of getting things ready for DC's fabulous and very attractive production department. What I'm trying to say is that it's going to be big and boring for some. The carrot on the stick is that the final colored version the Brad did appears at the end of the post...



The first thing I do is scan obviously. i scan at 400 dpi at full size which translates into 600 dpi print size which is how DC wants things. I don't have a fancy-schmancy $1200 large format scanner, so I have to do it it halves...



Then I enlarge the top half to 16" tall with Canvas size...



then paste them together...



and line things up...





Then I use the handy dandy template DC provided me (ya hear that Marvel? Templates are handy- hint, hint)...



And I paste my assembled image into it--



Then I select my black areas and fill them on a separate layer. I expand the selection by 3 pixels so I don't get any weird white edges---




This page needed a starry background. I have an image of space I converted to a bitmap that I use for stars. Here I paste it in---



and then trim the non starry areas using the same process I used selecting blacks



I then adjust the levels on the line art layer. If I don't do this a lot of detail is lost in the conversion to bitmap



Then I convert to bitmap using 50% threshold



And then I save as a tiff.



And here's the final image



Finally I transfer it to DC's ftp server where the send it to the mega-talented Brad Anderson for coloring.




That's it!

Here's the whole process from start to finish--



Hope that answers some burning questions!