THE ART OF LOOK-IN
HOW THE HELL......???

Good friend of ‘Look-out’ Shaqui is a graphic designer with some knowledge of the industry, I was curious to know how they got the artwork to fit from a large board to a comic page, it would be so easy today to resize on a computer, but how did they do it back then?

I know that some of the techniques used back then must have been primitive
compared to today, so I asked him….

‘Well I visited the 'Jarrolds' print museum in Norfolk last year (they
printed the 'Look-In annuals, among many of the 'World Distributors' ones)
and basically, the artwork is put in a huge camera - a bit like a giant
version of the old fashioned bellows cameras you may have seen?’  (See below)

 

’this can be used to scale or resize the image to any that is necessary.
Most artwork is 'half-up' (or 150% of the width/depth) or occasionally
'double' (200%), so reducing is usually 66.7% or 50%.

This will produce a film to the right size, which is used to
photographically produce a plate. Obviously b/w art only requires one
black plate, with tones of grey creating by using a screen which breaks it
down into dots. There is only black ink, and the size of the dots (given
as a percentage) give you shades of grey against the (usually) white paper.

Four-colour requires 'separation' into black, cyan (blue), magenta (a deep
pink red) and yellow, usually by a filter that is the inverse or negative
- the magenta film is created by using a green filter, the yellow one uses
blue, and (I think, off the top of my head) the blue may use a red. Again
tones are created by a screen and the pattern of dots for each colour is
rotated by about 30 degrees, to prevent getting an moiré or interference
pattern (like you get if you look through overlapping net curtains).’ (Shaqui)

I hope that wasn’t too technical for everyone, I think I’m a bit more clued up now, thanks Shaq. we sure are lucky to have PC’s these days!

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