Here’s a photo of a drawing that I took with my phone:
Scanners are clearly superior to phone cameras, but they break all the time, are not portable because of how delicate they are, and if they’re larger then 8.5 x 11, they’re expensive, so I’ve learned to run with cameras. See that gradient from bottom to top? That’s the consequence. Good lighting will help with that.
The question is, vectorize or halftone? Both have their pros and cons. Vectors looks sharper and more deliberate. Here it is vectored in three colors for grey paper. The colors are white, grey and black:
I trace vectors into the iPad using Graphic and an iPencil, and then I import those as an .svg into Adobe Illustrator on the real computer and work from there. Here’s what vectoring on the ipad looks like:
White is in yellow and black is in navy because I need to tell the difference between my vectors and the drawing underneath them. They get switched to their actual colors on the computer. Lastly they are inks, mixed to the correct color.
The problem with vecors are that they take a long time. It takes as long to vector an artwork as it does to draw it in the first place. I wonder sometimes if I should just draw originals and sell those instead of screenprinting prints. Using a nice quill pen and india ink…?
The alternative is halftoning the image out. Halftones are tiny dots that make up a picture, like pixels, only for print. You’ve seen them in newspaper print and t-shirt printing. So this is not vectorized:
45 LPI Halftones. THis image is two color, black and white, on grey paper. Compare it to the vector image further up. Which is better?
The good things about halftones are 1) They retain some of the drawing-feel of the artwork, you can sense the original brushstrokes, and 2) They’re much, much faster then vectors.
I personally like vectors better, but I wonder if anyone else could care less? Does it really matter at all?
Before you answer that, check out the obvious vectors in this artwork, as compared to the original drawing below it.
Which is better? The drawing or the vectorized image?