New Printer

[richardf8]

morgan1 and I replaced our dead and much maligned Inkjet today. We found a pretty cheap Laer Printer, A Konica/Minolta 3500W. My feelings about it are mixed - I totally shopped price on this one, because this was in many ways a needful purchase, and while I would have preferred the cheapest OKI PagePrinter, this was about 70 bucks cheaper.

It looks to be a good printer, with a small footprint, and setup was trivial, at least for WIN2K. It is, alas, a bit married to Windows, and although someone cared enough to develop a printer driver for it for Linux, it looks to be very raw, and I expect that getting CUPS printing working with it will be like pushing a dead elephant uphill with a teaspoon. Simplest solution might just be to save to PDF on the Linux box and then print on the Windows box from Acrobad Reader.

In the meantime, it's a relief to have a Laser again - the toner is both waterproof and Copic-proof, which is a very good thing for when I want to hand color scanned artwork. It also means that if I should be taken with a desire to do Gocco prints, I have something that will lay enough carbon down for that to work.

I tried printing some Cat-Tharsis strips from it, sized down to what they would be in a Plan9 book. The printer's 1200 X 1200 mode fared quite well with my line-art. Lines were crisp and all details present. I've heard that Grayscale presents challenges to this beastie, but I very rarely use grayscale, so that will mostly be a non-issue.

My strips, on the other hand, scaled down to Plan9 book size are very busy. I really need to learn to get control of my composition - I tend to include far too much non-essential stuff in my panels. Mostly I need to learn to crop more tightly.

Well, I suppose I should return to wresting some creativity from my muse. More Pencil to Paper combat.

Comments

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

Crop more tightly? How do you mean exactly?

[richardf8]

Since you seem to do it as a matter of habit, it's probably going to be a bit difficult to explain. Probably the best way to put it is that you are not afraid to let your characters take up a lot of space in a panel, whereas I tend to show a whole lot of the room and make my characters relatively small - as if I'm afraid to let them take up space. They don't really DOMINATE the panel like they should. Cases in point, because I have the originals handy are the January 4th and December whenever strips. In Panel 3 of the December strip the figures are small enough that not a whole lot of detail is visible on them, there's more distance than necessary between Willie and Grendel, all so that I can show an expanse of kitchen counter. In the January 4th strip, I've plunked Willie's mom in a vast expanse of an unfurnished room - like her furniture was repossessed or something. In Panel 2 Grendel and Willie should both be closer to Willie's mom and most of that room excluded from the shot. (I tend to think like a cinematographer when I talk about this stuff).

I have a lot of these same problems when I use a camera too - I tend to try to include as much as I can in a picture for "context" instead of giving the frame over wholeheartedly to my subject. This is an impulse that I need to consciously fight whether I'm looking through a lens or at a piece of Bristol.

I have this problem less when I'm doing stuff in your universe, and I think it's because I tend to plow through Regime Change for references, and your tighter composition is more at the forefront of my consciousness.

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

The below was supposed to be a reply to this, but you knew that. ;)