I prefer to draw with space-age graphite rather than a graphics tablet. It's just not the same thing; my puny brain doesn't enjoy converting sketches in one plane to pixels in another. It's fine for painting and whatnot, but sketching with a tablet is like coffee with milk and sugar. Not the same fish-kettle. Besides, I can't heft my computer like a turn-of-the-century bare-fist fighter hefting an anvil, then take it to Strombucks. Computers in Strombucks have to be balanced on one corduroyed knee, by law, and I'd need to be Tony Stark or Wallace to own trousers capable of that with my computer. I'm not sure Strombucks appreciates me drawing the street-life like some bespectacled art student at an inside-out zoo, but they haven't told me so yet. My pockets are stuffed with pencils, and it's easy enough to come across a surface pale enough to draw on, much easier than drawing in the megarestrictive domain of my tablet. So the result is droves of sketches out here in the real world and almost nothing in my gallery.

So scan them, nimrod.

Well, I don't have a scanner but I do have a pretty nice camcorder; it's all basically the same lark, right? Light goes in, magic takes place, ones and zeroes come out. So anyway, that's what I thought. I rigged up the camcorder to try and 'scan' my sketchpad, I'd take a photo of the setup but you can't take a photo of your only camera. Who watches the watchmen? Nobody. Unless they look in a mirror, then they watch themselves in a cost-efficient infinite loop. Unfortunately all the mirrors in my room at uni are nailed down to stop me nabbing them or using them against roving Gorgons. That's the only thing stopping me slicing one up and strapping it to my heroic frame as Perseus surely would have, given half the chance. Instead he had to make do with flying shoes, a mirror-shield and invisibility.

Actually, I'm pretty sure almost anything could be accomplished by a flying, invisible man. That's better than X-Men.

So, robbed of my anti-Gorgon sandwich-board, I bitterly drew the jury-rigged scancorder instead. [link]

The theory is I take a second or so of footage, sample out some frames and then merge them together to cancel noise. Job's a good'un. I ran the bizarre video format my camcorder speaks through a few esoteric commands to get a video format my computer speaks then channeled the same divine madness that granted humans such twisted creations as the sewing machine and Haskell to make a command-line for converting the frames I wanted. Thanking the space-time continuum for my many years hoarding caballistic savoir faire and steeped in the blood of sacrificial poultry, I merged the frames together with magick. After that it was- how you say... a walk of cake.

So I've scancorded most of the good stuff in my current sketch-pad. Perhaps sometime I'll do the same to the other graphite-smeared pages that positively bedeck my room. The resulting images have some wonderful compression artefacts and are at a pretty poky resolution, but through the wonders of image filters I can get to something that doesn't look quite 100% crap.