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...