My Sunflowers~continued (enlarging a drawing)

This is the final result. All the pieces taped together. The dimensions came to approx. 26" x 14" . Apparently enlarging a small image to such a degree in this manner is not without a few pitfalls. If you look closely one piece doesn't line up well with the others and is off by close to 1/2". At first I thought I may have over-enlarged that one section but I doubt it. It may have been a simple matter of my sloppy scissor skills.

This was the first image before enlargement...6" x 3"

I've decided to move ahead with the sunflower painting. I took the original image, removed unnecessary detail and applied edge detection to get a fairly simple line image. At that point I chose to enlarge the image to about 25" x 14". I don't own a projector so I used my combination printer/scanner. I think most printer/scanners have the ability to reduce or enlarge an image but I've found mine will lose resolution if I try to enlarge too much all at once and so began a rather laborious process.

My original printout was 6" x 3". I cut it in half and scanned each half, then enlarged each by 100% and printed a copy. That was quite a jump in size and things had begun to fade so I traced over all the lines with a .05 Micron pen before beginning the next round of scans. For the next scan I cut each half in 1/2, enlarged all 4 pieces by 25%, took the new pieces and enlarged them by 25% and for the final scan I cut each of the 4 pieces in half making 8 pieces and enlarged each by 75% which gave me the desired final size. Sounds complicated and confusing but it's really not. My scanner bed is standard size...8.5" x 11" so the cutting was an unfortunate necessity but it got the job done. It also helped a great deal to take the time and go over the second copy with the Micron pen. I didn't have to repeat that process again, thankfully. Now I have to tape all the final enlarged images together to create the completed 'drawing' and transfer to tracing paper.


Note: I numbered the back of each section so I would know what went where when it came time to put this puzzle together. I'm glad I did.