This Manga: I knowe this frumm my lernings

I don’t have a Scanner

Digitizing Your Artwork without a Scanner

With the coming of digital photography, scanners have become less and less relevant to most households… so chances are, you being a young artist on the internet, have one less tool to transfer your art from paper to a digital format. The most obvious choice has been to turn to the thing that are killing scanners in the first place, digital cameras.

However, this is probably the most abused alternative to scanning. Personally, there are few things more annoying to me than a person asking for comments on a blurry picture of a drawing. It’s like asking your teacher to grade that homework your dog ate after it’s made its epic journey through Fido’s digestive tract.

I’m not saying pictures of your art are absolutely bad in all instances. I’m saying you should know how to do it right.

Making sure your photograph of your drawing is clear and sharp will allow the other artists comment your art properly, and comment on the finest visual details of your art, especially the quality of your lines, the little patterns you make on costumes or the texture of your shading.

So before you go crazy snapping pictures of your drawings, here are a few tips that will help you take the sharpest and clearest shots of your drawings.

shooting drawings with DIGITAL CAMERAS

A camera’s sensor is not as sensitive as human eyes. What are normally adequate lighting conditions for us (like a room with one or two fluorescent lamps) are not enough for cameras to take sharp pictures. This especially applies to lower-end cameras like those built into mobile phones.

Therefore, take a picture of your drawing where there is plenty of light. And I mean plenty of light. I recommend these three methods (and a fourth if luck isn’t on your side):

use strong light sources (desk lamps, flash & yellow thing in the sky)

1. If it’s a bright sunny day, take your camera and your drawing outside and take a picture of it there. Shoot under direct sunlight for the sharpest results. (watch out for external hazards such as water or other things falling from trees, animals, people or man-made structures. You really don’t want those messing up your hard work. XD)

2. If it’s not a very sunny day, or if you’re just chained indoors by the powers that be, place your drawing as close as possible to a desk lamp when taking a picture of it. This kind of lighting tends to be uneven so also try to make sure the light isn’t just hitting one side of the page/sheet. Most ceiling lamps are too far and don’t give enough light for cameras so I wouldn’t advise relying on ceiling lights.¹

3. There’s always your camera’s flash… though it does have its own disadvantages.²

Be careful though! (in all cases)

¹When using a fluorescent lamp, be aware that the light generated by these lamps is not consistent. They flicker and change in color at speeds that are too fast for human eyes to notice but slow enough for some cameras to capture, sometimes resulting in a dark or orange-cast picture. To minimize the effects of flickering, use two or more lamps. Or choose a different kind of lamp altogether (honestly though, I don’t know what other kinds of artificial light sources could be strong enough for this purpose).

²If you’re taking pictures of pencil drawings, be aware of how pencil markings (graphite) are shiny and can reflect light at certain angles. This is a source of trouble most often when you’re trying to use your camera’s flash, but it can also be a problem when using other light sources such as lamps or the sun.

³Some cameras (especially those in camera phones) have a digital zoom function. As most photographers will advise, it’s better if you don’t use it. Digital Zoom is just cropping and resizing. The cropping part would’ve been kinda okay ’cause it saves you the trouble of having to crop it manually on the computer. Cropping would’ve been harmless if you didn’t lose the parts of the picture that was outside your crop. But it’s really the resizing part that you don’t want. It degrades the pixel information and makes your image all pixellated and blurry. Unfortunately, there’s usually no way to separate these two processes. Digital zoom just does both at the same time.