Cats arts and friends blog @catycomics - Tumblr Blog

Hi Tumblr! I´m back to bring you a new short form comic!

Mona is a live model trying to make ends meet until she encounters Fireldi. A famous artist not only for his marvelous talent at sculpting terrible creatures but also for his mercurial humor. With him she will learn the difference between a model and a muse.

42 pages, black and white, pdf.

CW- Sex, dubious consent

you can pay what you want for it at:

https://catymiau.itch.io/mona-mona

was a bit down today so I cheer myself up by designing Steven Universe tittle cards. (always felt that SU deserved them!)

#Steven universe #fan art #SU

catycomics

Hi Tumblr! I´m back to bring you a new short form comic!

Mona is a live model trying to make ends meet until she encounters Fireldi. A famous artist not only for his marvelous talent at sculpting terrible creatures but also for his mercurial humor. With him she will learn the difference between a model and a muse.

42 pages, black and white, pdf.

CW- Sex, dubious consent

you can pay what you want for it at:

https://catymiau.itch.io/mona-mona

Agares the nastiest demon

#art #demonology #demon

Hi Tumblr! I´m back to bring you a new short form comic!

Mona is a live model trying to make ends meet until she encounters Fireldi. A famous artist not only for his marvelous talent at sculpting terrible creatures but also for his mercurial humor. With him she will learn the difference between a model and a muse.

42 pages, black and white, pdf.

CW- Sex, dubious consent

you can pay what you want for it at:

https://catymiau.itch.io/mona-mona

#comic #queer art #art

sajanrai

the princess published / her summer gargoyle, a knave. / This year’s getting worse.

Abigor- The first Demon I met in my travels through hell. Gave me what appear to be good advice about warfare. Didn't seem to care that I was just a traveler and not a soldier.

#Demonology #infernal dictionary #demon

returnofforgotten

"Nono, I don't hate you. I mean, how can you hate an experiment? Whatever you were before, good, evil, right wrong? Now you're a petri dish. And I'm interested to see what grows inside."

A rad commission of Kala by the stunning @catycomics

codexnoirmatic

Gleseulbrahmnr, the Fim'narr Juggernaut, arrives the town of Mor Mëlmag. D'vërnmalax prepares a Grand Spell against him

zachhazardvaupen

3D album cover commission I did a while back for Gio Shyne’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’

acid-lich

A pet portrait from last year- the directive was to capture Bubbles as 1960s styled Joan of Arc/Hildegaard von Bingen

nicolerifkin

Drop

theartofasty

How do you go about getting such high quality scans of your art?

ok bear with me cuz this is going to be a lengthy post since I see a lot of people struggle with this and I think I could help by detailing my process.

before anything else I have to remark, this whole process only works with paper, loose canvas and any other media that can at least bend and warp a little in order to properly fit into a flatbed scanner, if you're working on on hard/non-maleable surfaces like wood pannel or mounted canvas, I recommend these tutorials:

Now, the first step is the most crucial: USE A GOOD QUALITY SCANNER! a scanner that's capable of obtaining photographic quality images is crucial, as there's no amount of editing that can salvage an image that has been overexposed, burnt, and artifacted to hell and back, here's an example: on the left, a scan of one of my paintings taken on the scanner of a cheap all-in-one printer. on the right, the same painting, scanned on a dedicated HP Scanjet G4050 flatbed scanner, which is the scanner that I still use to this day.

The difference might seem minimal at first, but when you start getting up close, the differences become REALLY apparent, not only are the colors washed out and muddy on the all-in-one scanner; there's some heavy artifacting on its scan as well as random blurry spots that makes the image look much worse, and the overexposure has completely killed the paper grain which is much more visible on the flatbed scan.

it's worth pointing out that both images you see here are what they looked like /AFTER/ adjustments and corrections in photoshop; the first one, as bad as it looks, took me several hours to of tweaking to get to that point, while the latter took me about 10 minutes of saturation adjustments to make it look as close as possible to the original painting. the reasons for this stark difference in quality are very simple: all-in-one printer-scanners ARE NOT made for scanning art, they're made for scanning documents, so the quality needed for that is much lower than the one needed for a painting or a photograph, so what you need instead is a dedicated, photographic quality flatbed scanner. One that I could recommend, not from personal experience but from recommendation from my peers, is the Epson Perfection V550/V600 Photo Scanner, BUT I don't want you to think from this that you NEED to shell out the big bucks into the most expensive and latest equipment in order to be able to get decent scans of your art, the previously mentioned scanner that I used is a lower-mid range device and is almost 10 years old, so if you ask me, it is perfectly acceptable to buy a pre-owned, used, refurbished photo scanner, as long as it's in decent shape and works as intended, you will be able to get what you need out of it. (***EDIT*** Another tumblr user with experience in professional media scanning has pointed out that while these scanner models are great and very advanced, they are very expensive and most of that pricetag is related to photographic scanning features that are not useful for anything that isn't photo negatives or digitizing of documents, their suggested model instead is the Epson Perfection V19, because "it's running the same photo scanning firmware as the higher-end models, has the same bit depth and still scans up to 4800 dpi. They run ~$70 brand new, even cheaper if you find them on sale or used.") Ok, I have the scanner, what now? the first and most important thing to consider when you're going to scan your work is: SCAN AT THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE QUALITY THAT YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE, most if not all scanners give you the option to select the dpi (dots per inch) measurements at which you want to scan. the standard for "decent" quality images is 300 dpi, but I personally find that extremely insufficient, yes, it will give you decent-ish images to post on social media, but if you want to do anything else with your images, like making high quality prints, posters, or high quality closeups of your work, those 300 dpi are going to fall really short and become extremely limiting. personally, I scan ALL my work at 1200 dpi, I could go higher than that all the way to 2400 but honestly, I've yet to find a use for an image size that big, at 1200 you already have enough quality to print a house-sized poster with a pretty decent looking final product, so unless you plan on hanging copies of your work to the side of the Empire State building or if you're trying to scan EXTREMELY small pieces, 1200 dpi should be enough, the file sized you're going to get out of 1200 are already almost ridiculous (yes, this image is over 1 GB in size)

Next, to address the elephant in the room: What do I do if my painting is bigger than the flatbed of the scanner? well, you're gonna have to learn to scan in parts like I do! the trick to scanning in parts is that every section you scan needs to cover a little more area than it should so that when you start stitching the individual scans together in your preferred image editing software, you can erase the sections warped by the edges of the scanner bed and cover them over with the extra area scanned in the other images, for example, here's a little chart I made on how I scan a medium sized painting in 4 parts:

make sure to NOT rotate the painting while scanning it, simply slide it across the bed to match your desired section, always with the top, bottom, left, and right pointing always to the same directions, if you start rotating the painting you run the risk of warping the whole scan, or warp it in less predictable ways, and it's gonna be a bit of a nightmare to stitch together. I also recommend to instead of closing the top of the scanner to make it flat against the scanner bed, keep it open and put a few books on top of the painting that are a 1 or 2 cm smaller than the scanner bed, the reason to do this is because closing the scanner cover and letting that flatten the painting, the fit between the top and the bed is so tight that you risk bending and damaging the paper/canvas when scanning, giving it some space at the edges when scanning lets the paper/canvas curl naturally with the material's own flexibility, so the risk of damage is much lower. if your painting is bigger than that, you will essentially follow the exact same process but just divide the painting into more scans, personally I've done up to 9 scans per a single painting on my biggest pieces, any more than that can get a little toooo complicated to stitch together, but not necessarily impossible, especially considering that a lot of image editing softwares nowadays have automated stitching functions, which CAN get over the edge warping on their own, but I've personally found that you'll still get better results if you can eliminate that warping and let the AI work with the best sections of the scans only. PERSONALLY I don't use the automated functions and prefer to do it completely by hand in Photoshop because I'm a neurotic perfectionist and I tend to zoom in into the paintings and notice every little microscopic smudging and bad overlap the AI does between the scans that 99% of people won't notice, but hey, that's just me, absolutely feel free to use the automated functions that the software gives, you don't need to be as extra as me! I think that about covers most of my process there, remember this is a process that might take a little practice so don't give up if your first scans don't look that great or look wonky when stitched together, you have plenty of room to finetune and adjust everything to your liking. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to answer. Also if you found this small tutorial useful, maybe drop me a tip or checkout my patreon and store to support me ;) ***edit*** noticed someone added a flashing imagery CW so I modified the gif so that it blinks slowly and it's hopefully less hard on the eyes!

zachhazardvaupen

Excited to announce that the first issue of my comic Therapy Gun has been officially digitally released!

Therapy Gun is an ongoing comic series written and drawn by Zach Hazard Vaupen that takes place in the near future after society has started to experiment with ways to no longer rely on police, but with the capitalist system still in control, problems arise. Unable to let go of the problems of the past, cops become cameras and therapy becomes a gun.

This first issue collects the prologue and first chapter for 48 new pages of comics to enjoy!

~Available in both PDF and CBZ format so you can read it in whatever format works best for your comic reader of choice.~

Shares are appreciated!