The Van is finally here! A year ago, (see July 20, 2007 entry) I was asked by the Birch Aquarium education department to provide a design to be wrapped around a new outreach van. I did some draft designs to be used as proposals, and the donors approved. I guess it took a while to get the donated money, to pick a van, acquire the van, find a van wrapper.
Now the challenge is to size my images up. Original fish images are about Letter size, at 300 dpi, which is high res, but the van is 244 inches long, and images are needed in 100-150 dpi. I don't want to re-computer-draw everything. So I used the Magic Number: 116.18. This multiplier works to enlarge images without losing as much quality as other multipliers, for some magical reason. So I multiplied this garibaldi by 116.18 several times until it was the size that it would be printed for the real van, and printed it out to see how pixelated it might be. I taped it on the van (left pic). It wasn't bad at all! Good.
The right diagram is a template provided by the van wrap company. I'll need to fit my kelp forest scene on there, but it's more complicated than that because my design is a continuous 360 degree illustration. I'll have to figure out how this is going to work...
2 comments:
Can you convert your images to vector images? If you do that, then you can make them as large as you want without sacrificing quality. I once converted an image by using Adobe Illustrator so that I could print it on a large banner. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I know that it can be done.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Vectorizing works well on relatively undetailed images by simplifying blocks of colors into shapes. Unfortunately my fish and kelp images have a painterly quality, which would take a lot of tweaking, or many thousands of blocks of vector shapes, each with gradients of color, to achieve a similar look. There are short cuts in Illustrator (Live Trace Tool) for doing this, but the result on some images has that slightly plastic look, like those digitized people in the charles schwab commercials, which may or may not be desirable. Had I designed the fish originally as vector images or with vectorization in mind, that would be a different story, but these were optimized for raster,so it's less complicated to keep them as such.
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