Digital image "cleaning" - what do I do?

5 days ago
3 min read

I say on my website,

"All artwork is digitally scanned, digitally "cleaned up", and saved for purposes of making high fidelity prints."

What do I mean by that?

I hope to show you through a few comparison pictures.

The French have a term for cooking some of you may be familiar with; "mis en place." Essentially, it means "everything in its place". It's this idea of being organized and orderly, even clean , while you cook.

I try to be that way when I draw. Especially with graphite, but also with color pencils. Even when wearing drawing gloves, and planning my drawing process to work from lighter towards darker areas, it gets messy. No drawing is approached in the same way.

To start, most quality drawing papers are themselves not pure white to begin with.

Once the drawing has begun, I keep my pencils in trays at a separate table away from the drawing surface. I keep a clean "edge" on my erasers. I try to clean my drawing table every few days, depending on how much work I have put in since the last cleaning. I periodically clean rulers and erasure shields and templates., especially when I see them starting to leave a graphite smudge or trail on the drawing. Even the slightest hint of graphite dust can smear an area of the drawing I am trying to maintain as white or lighter than other areas. Pencil drawing is all about contrast between light and dark, tone and shade. I constantly erase drawing borders, and my work top in an effort to minimize the smearing and spreading for graphite particles.

As I complete a section of the drawing, I protect it with a workable fixative, especially the lighter areas. I continue to layer on workable fixative as I finish each surrounding areas, to maintain my desired contrasts. (A final fixative is applied to the entire drawing when it is completed to my satisfaction.)

Never-the-less, when I am done, with all the effort above, the areas that are ostensibly "white" really are not, and I sometimes lose the mood I am trying to create through contrast.

So - after I get the digital scan of the final original drawing, I go to work with Photoshop to clean things up. In the first sample picture, you can see what the cleaned up border and text looks like compared to a portion of the drawing title I have yet to digitally clean up. By erasing the background around the text, I create a pristine clean white border to set the drawing and title and signature off. This process can take many hours.

On the digital scan of the original drawing, the red circled area on the right is considered "white". But as you can see, it is actually a very uniform, light gray haze compared to the rest of the border area that I have digitally erased.

I make other slight edits as well, particularly when trying to enhance the brilliance of starlight, moonlight, and other lights sources - again, to capture the scene I originally envisioned, but can't be created in the drawing process.

I will also "heal" (a Photoshop term) blemishes in the drawing that are an artifact of the drawing process. Scale or perspective lines, pencil errors or drops, etc. The final result for purchasers of my prints is a contrast of a rich black or color ink on the brilliant white background of fine art paper.