Wednesday, June 16, 2010

It Would Be Magical

In between the nightly tornado warnings that find us hanging out in the basement on an air mattress, watching movies on the portable DVD player, there's been a lot of swimming, rollerblading, lounging, reading, eating, experimenting, painting, etc.

Still inspired from Saturday's craft fair, and in the process of explaining to the girls about levers, I've been big into the button machine again lately. I made a ton more comic book pinbacks as an exuse to sit for a while and watch Bones on Netflix:
Pinbacks are notoriously hard to photograph. Since it's text, the camera's focus has to be perfectly sharp, and the plastic cover gives off a wicked glare. I have long wanted to sell prints of my pinbacks, however, since they're so awesome and all, so after tons of experimentation I've come up with a method that works well: (1) Scan, don't photograph. (2) Up the contrast and the clarity and the black level, but go easy on the sharpening. (3) Stick to a 4"x6", and even then don't try to fill up the frame with a single button.

The result:
I'm super-happy with the result. A 4"x6" is too small for Imagekind, where I usually sell my photographs, so I'll be putting some of these up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop as pdfs this week. Mostly, though, I have visions of notecards dancing in my head...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh god, can I buy the horde pinback???? PLEASE!?! I recently started playing WoW as part of the Horde, and the geek/nerd part of me got really excited about that pin.

julie said...

Hells, yeah! I can have my Matt interoffice mail it to you all top secret again, if you want.

That piece is from a Masters of the Universe comic, which RULEZ, but I'm V glad to know there's a WoW connection, as well, because now I'm DEF going to make a print of it for etsy.

Anonymous said...

I knew it had to be unrelated to WoW, but it definitely seems like it could. If you want to play at that angle some more, you might be able to find something about the alliance. Horde v. Alliance, always.

Getting the pinback through campus mail would be perfect. Should I sent $$$ to him first?

julie said...

Let's do it at the same time, and it'll be a race! And also, freakin' hilarious to interoffice mail a buck. He's Matt Shoemaker at the DeVault Alumni Center.

Anonymous said...

I'm on it!