scanning 12 field drawings

[edvinil]

I'm new to hand-drawn animation and am having difficulties with scanning. 12 field paper is 12 1/2 X 10 1/2, while the average scanner has an area of 9 X 12- mine is an Epson V300. I tape my Acme peg bar to the side and scan my drawings, but as you can imagine, keeping the art flat against the glass without the lid is hard, so I place a piece of illustration board over the sheet once pegged and weigh it down with a book. Here's the problem- while advertised as a "flat-screen" scanner, this scanner still has a small lip around the glass that stretches the paper and puts pressure on the registration holes in the sheet once positioned and weighted down.
Outside of pulling off the plastic housing for the scanner to get the scan area truly flat, what can I do- and dropping 1K on a new scanner with a larger scanning area isn't a real option. Can you get around the technical issues of changing the focal length of the scanner if a piece of glass where placed on top of the existing glass to eliminate the "lip" of the
scanner case? Any experience/advise on this would be appreciated!

[gradenator]

I know this will sound dumb but have you ever considered using smaller paper/media for you art? I mean, redrawing some stuff shouldn't be too hard and a whole lot less complicated than getting your scanner to do what you're describing. I don't really know how important it is to get ever single detail on the outsides of the scanning area. If it's really worth the trouble to you, you can always just stitch the scanned images together in photoshop or gimp or whatever.

[edvinil]

Hi Gradenator-
Problem is the pre-punched paper you buy to use with the Acme peg is 12 or 16 field, and if you want to keep the scans consistently in register, using the peg bar is necessary. I've seen the set-up used to photograph the finished painted cels, and a glass platen is closed over the top of the cel, registered by the same Acme pegs, to keep it flat while being shot. This is for the old film systems though, so not much help here. A paper punch for the Acme peg systems starts at $500, so punching smaller paper is an expensive solution too.
Thanks for your suggestion!!

At 5/9/12 08:24 PM, gradenator wrote: I know this will sound dumb but have you ever considered using smaller paper/media for you art? I mean, redrawing some stuff shouldn't be too hard and a whole lot less complicated than getting your scanner to do what you're describing. I don't really know how important it is to get ever single detail on the outsides of the scanning area. If it's really worth the trouble to you, you can always just stitch the scanned images together in photoshop or gimp or whatever.

[Celshaded]

Dude you can get 8.5 x 11 paper that's pre-punched from lightfoot: http://www.lightfootltd.com/

it's like $10 for a pack of 5000 sheets of paper.

[edvinil]

Okay! I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip!

At 5/11/12 07:42 AM, Celshaded wrote: Dude you can get 8.5 x 11 paper that's pre-punched from lightfoot: http://www.lightfootltd.com/

it's like $10 for a pack of 5000 sheets of paper.