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Sunday, July 11, 2010

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.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am going to explain to you an easier way to enlarge and print at the same time.

Billie Crain said...

I'm all ears, Robin. This was a pain in the you-know-what.

Jeanette Jobson said...

Another option would be to bring the line drawing to a copy shop who have larger scale printing available. Its not that expensive either.

Billie Crain said...

Great idea but we're in the midst of tourist season here so getting through town AND finding a parking space would be just as time consuming.