Full Circle! (DD4 Chapter One, Pages 1-11)

Here we are! Now that the first ten pages are done, the line art for Chapter One of DD4 is complete, all forty-something pages. Here, we learn…

There is an adventurer aboard this ship. Brave and bold, with eyes full of the spark of exploration. Her name is Alexandra Nichols.

She is on her way home to England, a place she has not been since she was an infant, where she will celebrate her fifteenth birthday and become a proper English Lady, with all the lucky rights and privileges that accompany such a status. An English Lady does not lead the constrained life of the women she knew from Smyrna, where her father had been on station these past few years.

An English Lady is truly free, Alexandra understands. In England, she'll have the liberty to skip through the rolling surf and soft, fine sand; bask in its warm, blue waters; pick its flavourful fruits; and run free among the fields of her sunny homeland.

But England is still weeks away. Excited as she is, she is not climbing the shrouds in order to catch a glimpse of its shore. Something else that has filled her heart with even greater excitement. She is climbing in hopes of being the first to glimpse the one thing that, as they left Smyrna, was on everyone's lips:

Pirates.

They lurk beneath heavy skies, eager to pounce on vulnerable prey. A pirate will board your ship, kill the captain, and take everything of value. If they think they might make a profit, a pirate will capture you and sell you as a slave in Tunis or Algiers. They are fearsome, loathsome, and cruel, and Alexandra cannot wait to see one.

WHAT'S NEXT?

This list is what's next. It's time to get these pages into the computer. I'll go into it in more detail in the next post, because each of those points is worth expanding-upon a little.

For now, I will follow up on the previous post and report the findings of my camera-vs-scanner experiments: the scanner is sharper, for sure. Not by a lot—all things considered, if I didn't have the scanner, the camera would be sufficient. 

(To provide a little background: previously I have scanned pages using a flatbed scanner. But I have a new camera, and it's pretty nice, so I wanted to see if it would give me a "scanned image" of comparable usefulness.)

My old scanner (and it is approximately ten years old, an inexpensive Canon LIDE700F) is at least easier to use than any camera setup, even if the picture quality was about the same. With the camera, I have to make sure the lighting is even, and I have to set up a tripod, and I'm not sure how to flatten all my pages that have become wobbly thanks to the watercolour business. The image resolution is sufficient, but not quite what I would ideally like (600dpi).

With the scanner, the lighting is even by definition, and the solution to the wobbly pages is to weigh them down using my traditional scanning weight: the omnibus edition of Jeff Smith's BONE.

But first I have to take a knife to these pages and lop off an inch and a half so I can get a whole page scanned in two scans instead of three. Onward!