Adventures in scanning and cartography.

Okay,  so there’s a few things I should probably tell you right up front: I suck at mapping.  I have terrible drawing skills in large part because of a learning disability.  But, with graph paper and a ruler, I can fake it in small doses, so I went with an old school style as much for the homage as it was easy to do.  I thought I’d done a great job and the color looked right, enough that I took a photo.

Yeah, that’s what it looks like.  Nowhere near as cool as it looked when I was staring at it.  It’s too dark, for one.  Two, the colors look washed out a bit and get lost in each other.  Bad move on my part.  Given that, I figured I’d scan the picture and things would be okay, right?  Oh, no.  Nothing doing.  Here’s an “F” for effort.

So, scanning should fix it and everything’s going to be okay, won’t it?  Well….  Have a look for yourself.  Yeah, it’s hard to see that.  Hell, I wish I could unsee it and I scanned it.  I figured it wouldn’t be too horrible and I could just fire up GIMP and fix the colors and make things look awesome.  I mean, it’s basically Photoshopping and if it works for people it should work for a stupid drawing.

Nope, nope, nope.

 

Oh, holy hell, what’s that monstrosity?  The ugly, it burns!  Everything is wrong in too many ways to count.  Someone scratch my eyeballs out for me!  This is a nightmare.  Not only are the colors terrible, but they’re severely damaged as well.

This is a picture I wouldn’t give my best gaming frenemy.  Sorry, it’s too cruel even for me, and if you’ve seen some of the things I’ve written for my own Planescape campaign, you’ll get that.

The ink pen I used was not only the wrong choice, it’s flaws make this look like a hideously mimeographed piece your teacher would give you for homework you could barely read and made you want to curl up and cry yourself into a coma.  You all remember that?  No?  Damn, must be a late 80s/early 90s thing.

Gel pens suck for this sort of thing.  That’s the lesson I learned here.  The color would have been okay….maybe, but the missing portions of lines that look like there were hollow walls, that’s all the ball mechanism.

Good thing I own a ton of pens in more than 100 colors.  I whittled it down to my fine point light blue UniBall Vision.  It not only worked, it looks true to the old school line style.

The takeaway from all of this: colors don’t work the way you think and just because it looks awesome with the naked eye, scanners will reveal how much your work sucks if you don’t use the right tools.