We're told to recycle all the time these days so, for this post, I thought I'd follow that particular advice and 'recycle' some of the old strips I restored from a rather dilapidated state in order to brighten up the walls they adorned in my room. I never kept copies of every stage of the restoration process, so the 'before' examples will vary from one strip to another, but the difference will be obvious (I hope). Every 'To This...' strip you see in this post is the transformed result arrived at from working on the 'From This -' example, not lifted from another source. Are you all ready? Then let's go!
FROM THIS -
TO THIS...
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FROM THIS -
TO THIS...
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FROM THIS -
TO THIS...
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FROM THIS -
TO THIS...
4 comments:
The first Hagar the horrible came up a treat. From a what looks well aged newspaper clipping to a visible comic book page..Well done..
Thanks, LH. I'm quite proud of them all - it took a lot of painstaking work to restore them, and I've managed to preserve a sense of continuity in that the new versions have actually been 'reworked' from the originals. It would've perhaps been easier to track down pristine new examples of each strip as replacements, but I preferred to work from the originals to produce the finished results.
Could you describe the process?
How you acctually restored them, the result look great!
I scanned the originals and, on the b&w and the greyscale ones, upped the contrast to whiten up the paper. Then I printed out a same-size copy of each and used process white to paint out any remaining discolouration. Then I re-inked them, and coloured them (with acrylic inks), though I had to ink over some lines that the acrylic inks had obscured. Then re-scan and print out the finished results.
For the colour ones, pretty much the same process. Scan them, up the contrast to 'bleach' out as much colour as possible, process white to paint out any remaining colour, print out on card, re-ink, re-colour, then re-scan the result and print out same-size pristine new copies. The Hagar Jack the Giant Killer strip was originally in colour, and the 'old' one seen here was an intermediate stage in the process, after I'd increased the contrast to 'bleach' out the original colour.
Time-consuming, but worthwhile.
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