Canal diving scrap shenagins

My favourite panel from page eight. Billy is investigating the tangle of scrap at the bottom of the canal to find 'The Goliath of Gas Street'. This page took a lot of digital clean up as I got carried away with the ink splattering. Some of those random ink spots landed in the wrong place. Breaking a line, distracting the eye.

For digital clean up I use my old copy of Photoshop from 2010. I have Affinity Photo 2 as a backup and spent some time last week playing with it's brushes and generative fills, oohing and aahing at the shiny new features. But when it comes to actual work Photoshop CS5 is my preferred program. Using computers to make art is a funny old game. I don't need 80% of what these computer photo manipulation programs offer me, for what I do with my original comic art pages. My PC computer from 2014 still works fine but I feel like it could fail any day now. so, as part of my digital backup plan I have Affinity Photo  to fall back on while keeping an eye on Currys PC World AIO 16GB SSD computers that are available. That same digital backup plan involves two external hard drives backing up the original digital art that lives on my computer.

At the very bottom of the canal, in the deepest darkest crevasse, in that heap of scrap, Billy would definitely find my copy of Photoshop and computer.

Before and after pages

After cleaning up the scanned page I use various PhotoShop filters, (Cutout, Gaussian Blur, Lens Flare) applied as low opacity Overlay layers and for the lettering I am using Anime Ace 2.0 BB Regular and bold (and applying faux bold in the PhotoShop character dialogue box because the Bold font is not that bold). I scan the A4 original page at 600 dpi and output the digital artwork at A3, at 300dpi.

Original A4 artwork                                                   Digital A3 Artwork