Here we go with the second sample illustration from the novel. I’m doing a bit better recording the process on this drawing. This drawing shows the arrival of Christopher Aggler and the two spying faces of Alex and Emma. Here is the scanned inks:
As you can see, the drawing had to be scanned in two parts and pieced together in Photoshop. I line up the two scans as best I can then use the eraser to “blend” the seam. After that I mess with the levels to get nice, crisp line art:
Once I’ve rid myself of the blue pencil lines, I convert the image to grayscale, select the gray channel and fill it with black on a new layer. Now I have all the black lines on a transparent sheet which makes the coloring process easier.
In the next installment I’ll show the flatting process (insert yawn here).
Photoshop does have a “merge” feature. Saves a bit of time lining things up. I use it to turn photos into panoramas. Most of the time it lines them up perfectly.
In CS5 it can be found under File>Automate>Photo merge
after that, its pretty simple.