I’ve recently been scanning a collection of diagrams by the late Francis Ow for a project to make all his self-published collections available. No matter how good your scanner is, you will get “bleed through” from the other side of the page. In the past, I’ve used judicious adjustments of the “levels” control to reduce this effect. This option works, but inevitably makes the diagram less subtle and I was anxious to preserve as much of the original as I could. A quick google later and I’ve found a simple and obvious solution – slide a sheet of dark paper under the page you are scanning. This gives the hidden page uniform darkness which can easily be compensated for. How I’ve missed this all these years I can’t say, but give it a try, it works!

Being somewhat obsessive by nature, I’ve been through every page looking for the odd “blobs” that inevitably appear on hand-drawn diagrams and removing them. This level of attention really gets you close to the spirit of the artist and you pick up personality that is generally absent in computer diagrams. One origami society magazine insists on redrawing all diagrams in a (IMHO) visually dull format, which I simply don’t understand. The NOA magazine diagrams by contrast (also redrawn) are of the highest standards. My early diagrams were truly awful and I jumped on board the computer option at the earliest possible stage, but I do love hand-drawn, such as that by Yara Yagi and Dave Brill.