Playing with photocopiers and scanners
I used to want a photocopier so much when I was a child that I would add it, fruitlessly, to my Christmas list every year. Little did I suspect that with the growth of home computing, the scanner would be a staple of many homes, allowing for much of the same functionality - and more besides.
The main reason I was so obsessed by the copying capabilities of these machines was that I produced comics as a pastime. If you wanted more than one person to read your comic at a time, in those days, you painstakingly copied it and stapled it together, gritting your teeth and living with the inevitable mistakes: paper not quite straight on the glass, ink running low, or your own thumb accidentally copied holding the page.
As I grew older, I actually grew to like some of those effects. Have you ever tried waving your hand over the glass as the copier copies? Placing random objects on the glass? Whipping the paper away in mid-action? If you’ve ever had a boring office job, I expect you have.
Well, this is art too. Go on, next time your boss asks you to photocopy a huge stack of paper, have a little fun. Or see what you can do with your scanner.
Shoe, scanner.
Posted: September 13th, 2007 under Media, Technique, Drawing for fun.
Comments: 2
2 Comments
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I used to love using a photocopier to reduce my drawings. It made any picture look so much better, somehow more professional, tighter, crisper. Scanning and reducing a drawing doesn’t have the same effect; the smaller picture is more pixelly and lower quality than the original.
I’m impressed with what you’ve done there with the shoe! That’s a technique I’d never thought of, I must have a go.
It helps that the shoes are slightly insane, I suppose. I have seen people do other great things with scanners, too - for example, much more three-dimensional pictures of flowers than you would achieve with a photo.
Reducing pictures, yes, but surprisingly, blowing them up often has impressive results too!