As an old-school artist, a valuable skill to have is knowing how to scan and stitch together your original paintings digitally. At the moment I’m stitching together the scans of the final artwork for Riley’s Tooth by Diane Cantrell.  Here’s how I’m going about it…

1. Scan your artwork in pieces :
• Place your artwork on the scanning bed starting in the upper left corner.
• Find a place on your scanner where you can visually align your artwork. I piece of masking tape down on either edge of the scanner to quickly align it.
• Tip : If your artwork is thin and warped, place a magazine on top of the artwork about the size of the scanning bed area as it will help press it down. Then stack on more weight.
• Tip : If your artwork is too large for the scanning bed, make sure it lays down flat and place something heavy on it to hold it in place. Sometimes removing the lid off the scanning bed and not using it can help maneuver for very large pieces.
• The more flat your artwork is, the more even the colours will turn out in the scan and you’ll reduce shadows. Scanning in pieces will inevitably create shadows on the edge of the scan, but the bigger the angle the larger the shadows are and more difficult to remove using Photoshop.
• Set the scanner to at least 300dpi and at least 100% in size (adjust to your needs.)
• Make sure your artwork is secure, and start the scan.
• When the scan is done, carefully lift your artwork and slide it over so that you can scan the next portion of your illustration, allowing 2-3 inches of the are you just scanned to be scanned again. This overlap will help you stitch together the illustrations in Photoshop (and trust me, it’s an awful feeling when you’ve scanned something very large to piece it together only to find a big chunk missing from not overlapping enough!)
• Repeat until the entire piece of artwork is scanned.

2. Set up your Photoshop File :
• Open the first scan in Photoshop.
• Set the canvas size of the image to whatever the original artwork’s size.
• Open all the other scans in Photoshop, and drag them into this larger PSD file.

• Save your PSD file.

3. Align the scans :
• Starting from the left and working to the right, align the scans one at a time (if you go all higgeldy-piggeldy it will take you longer to adjust & readjust the pieces.)
• Tip : set the opacity on the layer of the scan you are aligning to 50% so you can see the artwork underneath, it makes it easier to nudge the artwork into place. I like to use the cursors on the keyboard to move the pieces slightly.
• If you’ve scanned the artwork “straight” and the aligned to the same point each time it should be a matter of simply aligning vertially & horizontally the pieces. But if you’ve scanned pieces on different angles to each other, you may need to rotate the layers by a couple degrees to get them to align.
• Save.

4. Erase the hard edged seams :
• Once all the pieces are in place, I tackle the hard edged seams.
• Select the eraser tool and use a feathery brush setting to erase the hard edges. Toggling the layers underneath/above on and off will help you to see which scan has the best colour and therefore which to erase the shadow/poor colour from.

• Tip : For fine detailed objects in the image, try erasing around them rather than through them. (In this example, the seam ran across the white dog on the left, so I erased her entirely from one layer rather than dealing with matching the colours from one side to the other. See below)

• Save.

5. Adjust each layer’s colour brightness.
• Sometimes scans will come out slightly darker or lighter than each other, and when you’ve stitched the files together they look like ugly bands of dark colour through your illustration.
• To deal with this, select the offending layer, and go to Layers > Brightness & Contrast.
• Adjust the Brightness slightly until visually the layers look like they blend together.
• Save.

• Once the illustration visually looks as it should be, merge all the layers together.

6. Clone in extra bleed.
• Crop the PSD file down so that the edge comes close to but doesn’t crop the edges of the illustration.
• Where there is white space or tape showing around the edges of the illustration you’ll want to clone in extra bleed. (There’s nothing worse than sending a client a file assuming they’ll know not to show that bit of the illustration in the final product, only to see it glaring out at you in the printed product!)
• Select the clone tool and zoom in on the area to create more bleed.
• Select a big of the artwork close to the edge of the paper (see below) so that the colours will merge more subtly, and clone away!

• Tip : Try to select far enough in so that you aren’t re selecting again and again bits of the same area to clone, as this creates ugly patterns in your illustration.
• Save.

7. Touch up banding with the clone tool.
• Where there are still some seams showing or banding, try usng the clone tool here and there to clone like-bits of your illustration over top. (See below.)

• Setting the clone tool to 50% will help keep this adjustment subtle.
• Tip: Don’t go crazy with the clone tool! Remember you want to keep your scanned artwork as close as possible to your original masterpiece ;)

This is the final raw stitched together piece of artwork. From here I colour correct the images and do any other touch ups (like cloning out eyelashes that got on the scanner or where I’ve spilled a drop of tea here or there!) I always keep the original stitched together file as a backup.

If you found this helpful or if you have any more questions please let me know!