2015 - first post - cable cobblers

I managed to get about 8 extra pages done over the holiday which is the meat of the work.
All that remains is erasing pencil lines, scanning, clean up, colouring, toning and compiling layers... then adding text etc....
I let the ink set over night before erasing the pencils, as the copic pens don't like having pencil erased, and tend to fade to grey when "rubbed" (The Micron pigment inks are far firmer).

This morning I thought I'd "just" scan the cleaned up artwork in but of course the scanner refused to talk to the macbook.
Could it be a driver issue?(it's nearly always a driver issue using old kit on new(ish) Mac OS X versions)
I installed a driver written in OCTOBER 2014, which is like cutting edge stuff for my kit.
Still didn't work.
Switch to my old macbook, slightly better but still no real use - just solid black scans.
So I tried another cable and Bob's your uncle the scanner started to work.

However the power cable decided it would only charge the macbook if I draped it in a particular (random) pattern... finally as the battery hit red it decided it'd maybe start charging.
All of which meant that instead of using my shiny Cintiq and Creative Cloud Photoshop to edit the images, I'm back in Photoshop elements with my old Bamboo tablet... which actually suits me better.

Happy New Year.

SuperFogeys

I picked up the news of the SuperFogeys Origin competition on the Internets...
http://www.th3rdworld.com/web-comic/The-SuperFogeys
and as I'm in a black drawing mood I thought I'd give it a go...with REAL ink and paper and stuff.
I'll fiddle about with it in photoshop, add some colour to it, and ruin it later.

simpler ninja

colour and photoshop cutout filter....

New fangled technology

I spend my work day looking deep deep into the vile heaving black heart of technology, teasing it, twisting it to my pedagogic whim.

So when it comes to doing a drawing, it's all to obvious and easy to harness the same familiars, and invoke the adobe demons.

But, I'm not sure that I actually like drawing on the dinky little wacom, maybe I thought.. maybe I should buy a bigger one, or a cintiq... maybe I should buy a copy of Mango studio, maybe I should upgrade photofop... maybe I should just pour all my cash straight down the paypal tube.

Instead I've bought a new nib pen, and a selection of "Deleter" Manga inks.

I'm going all traditional. We'll see how long it lasts.

The trouble with photoshop

Anti-aliasing... draw a line with a brush tool, a nice black 9 point line, maybe a bit of variaion due to the pressure sensitivity on the tablet. To fill the area select bucket tool, apply and you get a fill with a white line between the line and the fill.
Double clicking the fill makes things a bit better... but to get rid of the white line, I have to go round the shape again.
There must be an easier way.
Anyway, it's this that's bugging me, and making me stop work on the pages...
I've spent days searching for a solution, with no luck, but a few seconds search on Webcomics weekly site and RESULT... http://www.webcomics.com/home/2008/12/22/color-flatting-your-comic.html Thankyou Brad Guigar.
Now I know the problem is called trapping, and the process to sort it out is called colour flatting. I now need to see if the plugin works on Photoshop Elements 4.0 on the mac....