I'm too Stupid to Use My Own Scanner

I recently figured out how to scan my drawings in a way that doesn't make them look like they've been run through a defective matter transmitter. It only took me about three years to do this, and then it was only because my friend Susan, who knows about these things, told me how.

In my defense, the process is completely counterintuitive. When I fire up the old Canon, it asks me what type of material I want to scan. I'd always chosen the "black and white line art" option, because, 1.) my drawings are in black and white, and, 2.) they are mostly made up of lines. It seems that this little test is precisely how Canon separates the smart kids from the ass-backward stupid ones. When I explained to my friend how I'd been scanning my drawings in the past, she responded "Oh, no. Don't use that line art setting. Scan your drawings as color photos." Well, that was just about the dumbest thing I'd ever heard and I wondered vaguely whether Susan had taken to hitting the sauce in the afternoon. I was desperate enough to give it a shot, however, and I'll be darned if she wasn't right.



That there's an exercise I did for a Drawing 1 class I took last fall. (Clicking on the picture will bring up a much larger version, by the way.) The assignment was to stuff a bunch of miscellaneous crap in a shoe box and draw it. There were slots in the sides of the box so some of the stuff was sticking out the side. The depth of the box is not readily apparent in this scan, since my scanner is smaller than the actual drawing and there were no 8-year-olds around to show me how to use Canon's foolproof "stitch assist" feature.

If Susan looks closely, she will notice a very poor rendering of a very nice piece of pottery that she made for me many years ago.