Above: And there we are. The last step (the varnish) again can´t be seen on the photo. With big pictures it is possible to match the brush- strokes to the lines of the photo. Use a good brush or loose hairs will ruin your work of art. If you´re good enough players will even touch the “painting” to verify the truth because the poster is no more readily to be recognized as one.
And how do you hang the things on a wall? One thin nail will be enough. Just press the painting onto the nail (making sure the nail is shorter than the thickness of the foam, but you might have thought of this even without me telling you, don´t you?) 2 nails - symmetrically or not- will keep it from hanging crooked. You can also press a nail into each side of the painting to attach a cord of the desired length to hang it onto.
Last but not least in a nutshell a few setbacks I encountred while building my “paintings”:
A phenomenon I haven´t managed to control is: Sometimes the tranparent laquer dries grey or even white and ruins your efforts. I was told this happens when the paint got “cold” but have not been able to provoke the effect. I don´t have the foggiest what causes that but it ruined a few pictures.
To appear like a painting the picture should be at least about 20 x 30 cm because with smaller sizes the filters that make the “painting” aren´t perceived properly and the realistic proportions of the motif that result from the use of a photo kill the effect. When you open the gallery with the examples (below) you´ll see what I mean.
Beware of “lines of pixels”: areas of the photo that have not enough of the little buggers so that straight lines appear as “stairs”. These areas must be identified on a test- printing of appropriate size and eliminated before printing the expensive poster.
Colours are evil and malicious- ask anybody! The backlit CMYK- colours of your monitor tend to change on a RGB- print. Often they´re too light, too dark or “wromg” (with me often too “red”). And just because your monitor can show zillions of colours doesn´t mean a printer can duplicate them all. The correct adjustment of these parameters is a damn science which I circumvent through experimenting. This is because we have no influence on the printers we order our posters from- so the way is to change our orignal -regardless of how it looks on the monitor- until we like the quality of the print. You´ll gradually learn what´s important but prepare to need 2 - 3 DIN-A4 (roughly 20 x 30 cm)- sized prints before all is well.
I´ve tried to overpaint a print with real colours but failed. I´m not that kind of an artist...
OK- here are a few of my works to illustrate my ramblings. A graphic designer would probably turn over in his grave (if he were dead) but hey- this is larp...
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