New Hardware Has Entered the Chat
Courtesy of a probably not very mysterious bear, I now have a large format scanner, a piece of hardware I haven’t had in my arsenal since I had to consign my ancient Mustek to the landfill in the 1990s. As you can imagine, technology has marched on, and this new scanner will do 12x16 at an optical resolution of 1600 dpi, which is about a million times better than that old, beloved scanner. Plus, it is cool looking, and makes hollow sounds like a boat, so I have christened it the USS Scanner (as it is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier).
One of the things touted repeatedly in the product literature for this scanner is that it has more than one light source, which “reduces noise.” I wasn’t sure what that meant until I started experimenting and discovered that it was removing the paper grain on my sketches. I spent a week trying to figure out how to "fix" that when I stopped and asked myself, “Um… why are you doing this? You spend hours trying to figure out how to get rid of paper grain in these grayscale sketches.”
So I’ve spent the past few sessions just… scanning things and trying to see them differently, and the more I do that, the happier I am. The paper grain is, to some extent, an important part of the picture. From an artistic perspective, and a “let’s document every single thing about this piece of paper” perspective, the dimples and shadows are significant. But they’re also… not reproducible, not really. Even when I scan something so that the grain is visible, you’re seeing a snapshot of it. If you held it in your hands, merely turning it would change the location of those shadows. If you brightened your source light enough, your eyes wouldn’t see the grain at all! And not even evenly, but in patches! How do you possibly scan something that makes all that data available?
The answer is: you can't.
This brings me back to the concept of a reproduction never being perfect… and that this is a good thing. Physical reality isn’t duplicable, and your experience of it is unique and irreplaceable. That's the wisdom that physical media has for us, and it's increasingly important, I think, in a world that's trying to convince us that virtual things are more real than real things.
Given that I shouldn’t be aiming for some perfect ideal of ‘you can’t tell the difference between the scan and a print of the scan’, I come back to ‘what am I aiming for.’ And the answer to that is: “I want these very light grayscale scans to be legible without me spending an hour fiddling with various eraser/select tools.” And this scanner is spectacular at that task. So much so that I re-scanned all the artwork I put in the back of the retail edition of In Good Company because the results are so much cleaner!
Figuring out color will take a while, mostly because I don’t have an ICC profile for this scanner. But given that my big project is ‘scan 150+ sketchbooks, most of which are pencil drawings on white-ish paper’, I feel like I’m set. Thank you, Fairy Godbear. This is going to be great!
Which brings me to… you! I want to start scanning via livestream again, because it’s more fun with company! Do you have a preference as to time/day? Weekend vs weekday? Evening vs daytime? Let me know.
