After problems with the previous attempts to photograph The Metaning, namely, reflections off the black ink, this time around there was success. The difference was in altering the position of the lights, to about 160-170 degrees apart. Here’s a couple of actual size crops from the shots. There hasn’t been any processing of these, although the colour has shifted a bit in the sRGB jpeg process. The cropped bits of the pages here are about 8-10 cm wide, so you can see a fairly high degree of detail has been captured. That’s the important thing with this exercise – to archive the artefact itself, not just the drawn image.
The other interesting achievement this week has been to work out the system for creating speech bubbles for the full size original pages of The Metaning. After a number of experiments, the final formula was to use two sheets of tracing paper. After printing the speech bubble text on ordinary paper, I then trace the new letters and border in ink on the tracing paper. Once that’s dried, it’s laminated to a second layer of tracing paper with spray adhesive, and pressed flat. After everything’s cured, the bubble is cut out, and then glued onto the page with rubber cement.
The advantage of rubber cement is that it’s acid free, forms a flexible bond and is removable. I’d more or less forgotten about this stuff, it used to be used in graphic design in the days of manual paste-up and hot wax, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and desktop publishing was a newfangled marvel of modern technology.