Ch5 Pg1: Step 5 (Patreon)

I have an older Epson Expressions XL Scanner that can easily grab the entire sheet of Tabloid paper in one go. It's pretty awesome, and the best part is that I got it dirt cheap at a yard sale several years ago. It weighs about a thousand pounds but it's beautiful and I love it.

Anyway, I use the default "Image Capture" software on my Mac to scan the image at 300 dpi in full color, save it to a special "Scans" folder, and then move everything over into Photoshop. The original page comes off the scanner and goes into a special drawer with all the other DotL pages I've made over the years.

Remember Step 2, the sketch phase? I just drag the scan straight into that file, above the Thumbnail/Sketch layer, but below the Panels layer. After that, it's just a matter of resizing/moving the inks around until they fit into the panels. It's really tedious, but I know it will fit because I've printed this exact file and have inked overtop of it. I just need to be persistent!

After everything looks good, I convert the inks to Black and White, clean up the gutters (that's the spaces in between the panels), increase the contrast of the inks so they're nice and dark, make those tweaks I mentioned in the previous step, isolate the blacks from the whites so the layer is transparent, drop in the emblem, write some vague notes for Nytrinhia on a layer on top of everything, and drop it into our shared Google Drive for her to grab. EASY.