Hide Your Junk With Art, Make a Big Poster.

My friend moved out so I get my apartement to myself, wich is good. She took the shelves with her wich is bad because I have an ugly cardboardbox-monolith next to the couch with a lot of my stuff in it.
I decided to hide it with a poster and so I had to make one!

Step 1: Stuff You'll Need.

A computer with printer, ink and printingpaper
Sciccors
Ducttape (or atleast stickytape of some sorts)
Doublesided foam mounting-tape (or something to stick it up with)

High-resolution image .. I suggest using an imagesearcher like Altavista (yes everyone uses google but they ARE helping the chinese and american governments to censor the internet so I just can't support them)

A program that makes posters. Here are my favorites :

PosterRazor - a stand-alone program that makes posters from images as a pdf-puzzle. This is the one I will be referring to.

Poster Printer - a program that acts as a printer-driver to print anything directly as posters.

PDFCreator - another printer-program but one that makes PDFs from any program.

Step 2: Choose Your Picture.

I decided on this art-thingy .. I know nothing of art execpt what I like to have hanging on my walls. Someone is bound to comment on this.

My suggestion is to find an image that is :
Colourful - otherwise you'll run out of ink, imagine printing 1,5 squaremeters of red.
Really high resolution - otherwise it will look like crap when you blow it up.

Search with a searchengine of your choice.
Some nice places are :
Digital Blasphemy
NASA
animepaper

Step 3: PosterRazor

Doubleclick to start the program, after that it's all pretty straightforward.
You input the image where it says "Input image" and then you click on next.

Step 4: Defining Paper Format.

Step 2 in PosterRazor asks for info on papersize and borders, there's also a button in the lower-left corner if you feel the standards aren't yours.

I chose to remove all the borders, ie setting them to null.

Step 5: Image Overlapping.

In step 3 you overlap the image and define overlapping size, how much of the print that will be the same as the previous tile.

I set 1mm overlap and bottom right . coz I wanted to :)

Step 6: Final Size.

I measured my boxes as beeing 205*93cm.
I used absolute size and specified 95cm (2 for extra width)

Step 7: Saving and Printing ..

Next you save the poster, open and print it.
Pretty much standard settings on the printer did a nice job for me.

As an afterthought .. it might have been better to center the poster on the paper as I feel it got a bit off-center ones put up.

Step 8: Cut It Out ..

Now that you have all those papers you have to cut them up a bit.
I cut the bottom and right side of every paper. This because I chose that layout earlier in PosterRazor.

Step 9: Put It Together ..

There's much better ways than what I did. Probably ducttape isn't the greatest thing for this but it's what I had laying around .. you how it is.

I use three strips of tape and carefuly aligned every page in the rows .. even so I mucked it up a bit.

Then I put the rows together and presto!!

One poster.

After some thought I decided to put some ducttape on the back to hold the edges together.

Step 10: Put It Up.

I put small squares of double-sided tape on the boxes and just slapped up the poster.

Step 11: Before and After.

Alright .. so my home is still a mess but atleast I don't se that eyesore anymore. In it's place is nice art :)

Comments

[Sofiaan]

I use Poster Printer, its more convenient. The program prints each part of the image leaving the areas for bonding

[JohnMichael]

This looks like the work of Alphonso Mucha, a Russian artist. I think Mucha produced some of the best work of the Art Nouveau period. This movement was short lived because attempts to mass produce it quickly degenerated into Art Deco. I am not sure, but I am guessing the title of this one would be "Spring." For not knowing much about art, I think you have very good taste.

[FearTheDuck]

Mucha was Czech. I agree a superb choice.:)

[omnibot]

Thanks. I'm one of those "I know what I like"-people and this stuff is just epic.

[buhdieboy]

this is such a neat post im thinking about something possible that is the disasembly of the printer and fiting it with a syncked trak rack instead of paper rolers iot would track on a geared rail or rubbered drive wheel with straight rod guide in order to make this into a pc murial setup think of it doin prints on yer car hood or doors ect . t shirts ect it would werk it in my head if i get the time im doin it! thanks omnibot

[omnibot]

Have you considered just going to a printer? They can usually do a1 and bigger.

[buhdieboy]

hi say if you set the program to center ? no overlap on sides wouldnt you be able to use rolled paper inserted into most single page printers walah therby getting a section like 3 pages wide but on one longer paper cut the rite width to feed continuousely with little side track pritter jambs of misfeeds at say 3 sht wide? no what i mean?

[omnibot]

I think I understand, yes. I suppose if you run it without the margins up or down but I suspect there would be trouble with a printer that feeds individual sheets. Try it :)

[bumpus]

dude i just, like i just got done making a cardboard cut-out of myself using the same process, you shoulda mounted the image on a piece of cardboard so you could move it to cover one eye-sore to another...

[omnibot]

Yer .. I'm sortof getting arouns to it but I'm prolly gonna take it down anyway after the holidays and get some shelves. Although that would be a useful idea for the next project when I'm gonna put something similar on the wall.

[GorillazMiko]

wow, this is a very cool instructable! what are in those boxes anyways? oh yeah, nice printer.

[omnibot]

Thanx. The boxes are full of books, miscellaneous tools, computers I'm not using, my camping gear and other odds and ends that didn't fit anywhere else. I'm thinking of doing some giant papercraft (like the Tardis) to cover it up.

[Madrigorne]

The Tardis would be AWESOME. ;)