There is a certain type of drawing technique in comics, that makes me grind my teeth whenever I see it. It's when an artist fills in the background with black, but they don't take the ink right to the edge of the linework. Instead, they leave this white glowing edge. IN some ways it feels like a stylistic choice, but I find it jarring. I think it's jarring partly because it feels like the artist didn't want to take away from their line art, it feels like they're being a little too precious.

I recently had a computer problem which caused me to have to erase and reinstall my entire computer's OS to fix the problem. I backed everything up (well most things) but lost some of the software, as I no longer had the download codes, and to be honest, I'm not sure where I even got them from in the first place. One of the pieces of software I relied heavily on, and lost, was Adobe Acrobat Pro.

How to turn your comic book into an ebook  I was recently playing around with some file formats for comic ebooks. I have had some hit and miss results in the past and wanted to get this monkey of my back. In my last batch of trials I believe I may have hit on the right combination of factors. I'll share them with you here. First some background   I create my digital print files by scanning in my artwork at 1200DPI and then after some cleanup converting it to Bitmap mode (50% threshold) and save as LZW compressed tifs. I then compile these field using Adobe Acrobat Pro for a file I can take to the printers. This is not necessary for the creation of the eBook but rather just demonstrates why I have to shrink my files down to iPad size. This means I have to some how change these files from hi-res bitmaps to low res jpeg, PNG, or GIF files. This would be a slow and painful exercise to do one by one. Luckily you can create a batch process using actions in Photoshop.

The problem of contrast and tone . One of the major concerns when drawing comics or images is that of tone and contrast. This is especially true of B&W drawings but to a lesser degree with colour. It is often referred to as ‘tangency’. When you do not have tangency, the lines that you have drawn blend into one another an become hard to decipher. The image is basically flat and hard to read.  A/ This image doesn’t give us enough information; there is no contrast or line variation. B/ This is a little better, with some added line width, but still flat C/ This example is much better, there is line width, hatching and cross hatching, and areas of black. This helps us discern where the objects are sitting.  D/ This example uses screen dots to create a grey tone that gives us contrast. Notice how I’ve placed the black differently in this picture. The picture is a little flatter than ‘C’ but still works. This method could be used for stylistic purposes. E/ In this example I have gone too