Larger-Than-Life-Sized

Sean Michael Robinson:

Greetings all!

First off, I wanted to point you towards the Cerebus Archive Number Seven (FLIGHT) Kickstarter, which has ten days left to go, including more "Crazy Deals" (which, uh, have been truly crazy). Seriously, check out what's gone in the past few days:

CRAZY DEAL OF THE DAY - DAY#7
DAVE SIM (via fax relay): "On the SEVENTH Day of CRAZY-DAY DEAL OF THE DAY, Dave Sim gave to meee: SEVEN COPIES OF THE DIGITALLY REMASTERED CEREBUS TRADE PAPERBACK AUTOGRAPHED AND/OR PERSONALIZED ( BUT PROBABLY NOT ALL SEVEN PERSONALIZED TO ME BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE A LITTLE WEIRD ALSO) FOR SEVEN BUUUCKS!"

CRAZY DEAL OF THE DAY - DAY#8
DAVE SIM (via fax relay): "On the EIGHTH Day of CRAZY-DAY DEAL OF THE DAY, Dave Sim gave to meee: EIGHT AUTOGRAPHED AND/OR PERSONALIZED IDW DAVE SIM VARIANT COVERS THAT DAVE SIM WILL BAG AND BOARD HIMSELF FOR EIGHT BUUUCKS!"

CRAZY DEAL OF THE DAY - DAY#9
DAVE SIM (via fax relay): "On the NINTH Day of CRAZY-DAY DEAL OF THE DAY, Dave Sim gave to meee: NINE HALF-HOUR PHONE CONVERSATIONS ON HIS NICKEL (WITH ME OR ANYONE I WANT HIM TO TALK TO) for NINE BUUUCKS!"

CRAZY DEAL OF THE DAY - DAY#10
DAVE SIM (via fax relay): "On the TENTH Day of CRAZY-DAY DEAL OF THE DAY, Dave Sim gave to meee: TEN AUTOGRAPHED CEREBUS COMIC BOOKS OF HIS CHOOSING FROM THE AARDVARK-VANAHEIM ARCHIVES FOR TEN BUUUCKS!

CRAZY DEAL OF THE DAY - DAY#11
DAVE SIM (via fax relay): "On the ELEVENTH Day of CRAZY-DAY DEAL OF THE DAY, Dave Sim gave to meee: ELEVEN AUTOGRAPHED AND OR PERSONALIZED STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND TRACING PAPER DRAWINGS FOR ELEVEN BUUUCKS!"

CRAZY DEAL OF THE DAY - DAY#12
DAVE SIM (via fax relay): "On the TWELFTH Day of CRAZY-DAY DEAL OF THE DAY, Dave Sim gave to meee: TWELVE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND OUTTAKE PAGES OF ORIGINAL ARTWORK FOR TWELVE BUUUCKS"

As always, we appreciate your support. Head on over to the FLIGHT Kickstarter page and kick in, if you can.

***

Speaking of "Crazy Deal"s... I had an interesting task last week. The great actor Owen Kline, who made his debut in 2005's incredible The Squid and the Whale, is directing a new film called Two Against Nature. A scene takes place in a comic store, and for the scene he's asked Dave if he could include a five-foot-tall "Cerebus as Charlie Brown" figure. 

("Crazy Deal" connection—one of the remaining "Crazy Deal"s is the chance to be an extra in the film!)

But of course, someone has to ready a figure for print!

I started by pulling out my copy of Cerebus #275, the issue where the figure appears in color on the cover.

Here's a scan of the relevant portion of the cover.

Unfortunately the image would need to be descreened in order to work with it, to prevent moire from the original screen overlapping with the new color screen.

Here'd a close-up of the original to give you an idea of what the line screen is looking like.

So I would have to descreen the image if I were to work with this as a source.

I got to work, using the same techniques that I used on last year's Going Home restoration—some judicious use of oversampling, Median filter and Gaussian blur.

Here's the result.

But the resulting image was not really anything to write home about. There was some kind of low-level noise, even visible in the original on careful examination, that would look blotchy and streaky when enlarged. If this sucker was going to look good, or at least reasonable, blown up twenty times larger than it originally appeared, it would have to be approached in a different way.

My first thought was to strip out all but the color and then recreate the color layers with some vector tools, but fortunately, there was no need. Dave dug his original hand-done color separations out of storage and Fedexed them to me to take a look.

Aha—jackpot!

Inside the package were six sheets of paper, each one with a cyan-only printout of Cerebus, with black ink drawings atop them and instructions to the side. Each of these sheets represented a color (or two) that would be added by Chris Verhoeven at ScanColour, the organization that worked with Dave on the Latter Days covers. (Chris is credited as "color technician" in the interior front cover of the issue).

On some of the sheets Dave calls out the color by CMYK percentages. On others it's more approximate, allowing some judgment based on the appearance of the other colors.

And then at the very bottom of the stack, on what I initially assumed was just a backing board included to keep the loose sheets from bending, was the original line art, drawn on a small piece of chopped-up Bainbridge art board.

I scanned all of these elements at 2400 ppi, the highest effective optical resolution of my scanner, and then dropped them into the same Photoshop document as their own layers. Then I used the Edit-> Auto-align Layers function to align the layers, then did the last bit of alignment using my own eyeballs.

Then I used the Image -> Adjustments -> Black and White feature to knock out the cyan out of each layer, leaving only the black ink drawing. Two more  adjustment-- a little bit of sharpening and then Image --> Threshold, and I was done—left only with the drawn portions of each layer.

If this were intended to be reproduced with each color having its own printing plate, on, let's say, a t-shirt or a CD or a milk carton, then this would be the stage where you'd export each line art layer as its own 1-bit image and then add them back together in either Illustrator or InDesign, which allow you to save PDFs with multiple bitmaps all indicating their own color. But because this would end up as a single flat color image over a line art layer, I took a different approach and built up the color in Photoshop.

I adjusted each layer using the Hue And Saturation feature with the Colorize box checked, each layer set on Multiply. Here's the image with the first four colors added.

For each color I added I consulted the printed copy as well as Dave's detailed notes, sometimes making slightly different choices than were made on the original. When every layer had been added, I did just a bit more cleanup to some of the color layers, flattened the color, and then exported the line art and the color separately, recombining them into an Indesign document, the line art as a 600 ppi 1-bit bitmap, the color as a 8-bit color 300 ppi TIFF.

And here's the result, ready to be 60" tall!

If you're an illustrator who's never tried your hand at hand-colored separations of this type, I'd heartily recommend it both as a stimulating design exercise, and as a practical way to get the most out of certain types of printing. Especially designing for CDs or other surfaces where traditional screens don't do justice to full-color work, this is an incredibly powerful technique.

Two of my own more recent examples, with much more minimal color, one for a poster and one for a t-shirt. The poster color overlays were done digitally, but the shirt overlays were drawn directly to tracing paper and then scanned and digitally combined.