Scott brought not only his sketchbook, but also his 21CF sketchbook with the last 80 or so strips in it and he let me check out all of it! Just awesome stuff. Scott allowed me to take a few photos of the books, which I will be posting on my www post haste, so watch this space
A couple of observations:
There has been some nattering on the quality of Scott's artwork as compared to his story telling. Looking at the real deal originals significantly changes that perspective for me.
Scott's style is fine detail rich - detail that just gets creamed in the digitization/ shrink and .jpg process. It's not the art that's the problem, it's the process of getting the image up on the web in an affordable (for Keenspace) modem friendly format that squeezes the detail life out of the artwork.
It makes me wonder just how many other strips out there are squished and .jpg'd to death as well... There are a couple of ideas Scott and I discussed on how to improve this situation before passing out after a long con day:
Scott wants to start drawing on 11x17" paper. Where cartooning is concerned, Bigger is Better. He is researching an 11x17" scanner, so he won't have to dink around with cut 'n pasting of multiple 8.5x11" pages that will add to the already too lengthy process of creating the strip.
I have offered Scott webspace on my server for hosting a high resolution version of each strip once I get the box back on line, probably by Monday or Tuesday. The pipe is a 128Kbps upstream, so it's reasonably snappy.
This will allow KS to keep on keeping on with it's excellent service to the general community with ~75K images sizes while providing us 21CF fans a visually tasty high-res archive to enjoy.
The current strip is roughly 575x400 depending &ct. Even a modest bump in size to 1024x768 combined with a more moderate amount of .jpg compression will restore much of the fine detail that Scott puts into his work. My swag is a target image size of around 150KB would produce a significant gain in quality, with a diminishing return above 200KB.
Scott: If/when your up for doing this, we can perform some basic quality and practicality testing of various size images. Just let me know. I can easily cobble together some batch files (yes, it's an NT box, you Killer Penguin Boys can put away your full auto armor piercing herring rifles now
that will automate the process in a slightly cruder, but still effective, way a'la KS.More on the con on my LJ when I get up tomarrow and find some time to make a proper entry.
CYa!
Mako
Happily Exhausted in Zzyzx
I'd love to see 21Century Fox in higer resolution!!
) pictures, Mako... hehe...