Here we are at page 10. We thought this page turned out pretty nice. Of course we try to make all of them special but some seem to work out better than others. Mark had a great time coloring it. There was the opportunity for some photo backgrounds which he always enjoys using and there was a wide range of color called for which just makes for a more appealing page all the way arround. That always takes a little longer but it’s still fun.

Some have asked what we mean by remastering the art. Well, the line art, as you may recall, was done back in 1987, 22 years ago. We didn’t even have the use of computers then and even those that were available were like hand held calculators compared to what we use today.  All the art and lettering is therefore done completely old school style. So what we did to start with was scan all the black and white original 11 x 17 art boards into our system. We use an oversize scanner which is perfect for this. We then do initial clean ups, removing dirt, blemishes or scratches and patching anything that needs it. The next step is to remove the old panel borders and replacing them with crisp computer generated lines. The same for the lettering. The book was originally lettered by hand. Unfortunately the letterer did it a few pages in a sitting and and even though it was a good job, it was inconsistent in places. We thought the computer lettering with Blambot fonts would make for a better read. In some cases the art has been modified beyond the patching after removing the old word balllons. For instance the backgounds on pages 6 & 7. Pages 9 & 10 feartured a completely overhauled autogyro design. Then after all that the coloring process begins. Mark uses PhotoShop to break the pages down into layers. The line art is divided into two different pieces. One is for the coloring and the other is a black outline copy that fits over the color outline copy. Sound effects are separated to an different layer as is all the lettering. Each file may have as much as 15 layers. Some colors are filled with the paint bucket while some are filled with gradient colors. The retouching and shading are done and final adjustments to finish. Whew! That’s a lot of work just to explain!

And that’s pretty much a wrap for this week. Everyone have a great weekend and do something special for the moms in your life on Mother’s Day this Sunday!

Tags: comics, Greg Legat, independent comic, independent comics, J. Adam Walters, Mark Poe, Mega Tales #1, science fiction, super hero, Tess # 1, tesseract

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