Badassifying my Wall - A Trip Report

[yasher]

SECTION HEADINGS & IMPORTANT CRAP IN BOLD. CLIFFS NOTES AT BOTTOM.

This post had a weird name, so I'm not sure if too many of you saw it. I used the program I found in that post - the Rasterbator - to create this piece.

Rasterbator Settings
- 5 MM dots, because I sorta like the dots. I'd use 3mm or 2mm on a smaller piece, but I think 5mm was just fine with a piece this large; I like the dot-matrix look.
- 10x10 pages, landscape, letter sized pages

THE ORIGINAL



THE COSTS

Away to Office Depot, where I bought 250 pages of bright white card stock; I also bought two 15ft rolls of double sided tape. I had originally planned to buy foam board, or something of that sort, to mount the images to; that ended up being more money than I wanted to spend, so I settled on mounting the card stock directly to the wall.

Office Depot Total
250 sheets of card stock - 11.89
2 rolls double sided tape - 12.58
----------------------------------
Total - $26.43


On to Kinko's. I get setup for self-service printing, and then I realize I'm not only paying $.20/minute to use their computer, they want $.49/page to print. Yeah, right. Ready to bag the whole project, I talk to the guy behind the counter, and its 8 cents/page if I have them print it all out. Wow. So I leave my stock, with instructions to print on the entire page - their printers should be able to do that.

Well, I get a phonecall - I left instructions to call me if there were any issues - and apparently their printers have to leave a 1/8" margin. That sucks... until the kid offers to cut the margin off every page for me. Good times, that rocks. I get to Kinko's at midnight, and 20 minutes later, I have all 100 pages... printed & cut for $7.02.

Kinko's Total - $7.02

Alright, that's all I need. All told, I spent $33.45 and I still have 150 sheets of stock, and maybe 5 feet of double sided tape that I can use for my next project

THE FINAL PRODUCT



Its 10x9 - the 10th row was about an inch of actual ink, and then blanks... I wasn't about to bother hanging those. 9' x 6' or so. It took me a few hours to get it all hung up, because its a bitch pulling the backing off 4 pieces of double sided tape per page... but 360 pieces of double sided tape later, here we are.

I like the gaps between the pages. I'm gonna do a few more of these on other walls, and I'm sure I'll do one with no gap, but as I mentioned in the first thread, the idea of doing it with no gap didn't really even occur to me. The gap just seems right. I like the look it brings.

Problems I had
- Scissors suck for cutting double sided tape. I ended up laying it out on a piece of metal and cutting it with a razor blade. Scissors kept gumming up because of the sticky side of the tape.
- I had a hard time keeping the spacing constant.
- My ceiling isn't plumb

Conclusion
I had a great time doing this. Even though it took a few hours to get it all hung, I spaced the work out, and didn't get too frustrated with the damn double sided tape. If I had $100 to blow, I might have mounted it all on foam board, and then mounted that to the wall. I wanted to have some portability; but I realized that for $33, I don't really need portability. I can always just tear it down and start over, for that kinda money.

Oh, and yeah, I probably shoulda made the bed before I posted the TR photos, but whatever. Just imagine that I'm not a horrible slob.

I've got a couple other blank spaces on my wall; the "badass photos" thread hasn't turned up too much, and the Rasterbator thread looks like its dying out, so hey...

Suggest some photos for my next project. If color ink isn't too expensive, maybe I'll do a small color one. Any suggestions or input are appreciated.

Cliff's Notes
Decorated my wall. Tell me how badass it looks. Suggest photos for next project!

[GoCubsGo]

Very badass. I really like the picture you chose. (After you first posted the image, I decided it will be the next one I do.) The time you spent was worth it, your spacing looks perfect. Also, I tried using single sided tape. It doesn't look awful, but double-sided was definitely the way to go. Can you post a pic of just one page closer up, so I can see what kind of detail 5 mm dots give? I used 7 mm and the dots were too big for my liking.

[ahnuld]

Cool. I may do that when I move out and need to decorate my place. In terms of cool pictures to use im drawing a blank, sorry.

[tomdemaine]

one I thought was cool

[Rotating Rabbit]

very good indeed

[yasher]

i think i dont know how to use my digital camera very well.

so this is the best photo i could get of one of the sheets. its from the top of the towers, for comparison to its spot in the photo.

i think as i go smaller in scale ill definitely go smaller in dot size. after all, its not even my ink.



if anyone could explain why the photo came out that way id appreciate it!

yasher

[CrazyEyez]

That is fricking tremendous. Well done. Would it have cost a lot more to do it in sepia like the original photo?

[CrazyEyez]

[ QUOTE ]
Suggest photos for next project!

[/ QUOTE ]
Delicious artistic girl on girl action from allposters.com

NSFW

[russellmj]

Yasher, I think you'd get a better effect using the same tone as the original.
Nicely done however.

[man]

yasher,

[censored] awesome! I am doing this when I get my own place.