Artistic Unique Desktop Wallpaper

If you practice art painting, you probably use a cloth to clean and dry your paintbrushes. After a while it turns into a rainbow palette that looks like an artistic canvas. The colour pattern is unique of each cloth and artist. This multicoloured pattern looks ideal for decorative purposes. My idea is to have it as an original desktop wallpaper of my computer.

For this instructable you need
- A scanner
- A basic Image software. I will explain the steps with FastStone Image Viewer, but any imaging software can do the same. Another light and capable software is IrfanView.

Some links to download the software

http://www.faststone.org/

http://www.irfanview.com/

Scanning

The title is self-explanatory. Lay your cloth on a standard scanner and scan it at low resolution (100-150 dpi). If the cloth is larger than the scanner glass, you can get multiple scans changing the position and the orientation. In this way you get multiple images to choose from.

Image Resizing

The shape and size of the scanned image needs to be adapted to the screen resolution.

Open the image with FastStone Image Viewer.
Adust image ratio.
Activate the CropBoard tool (picture 1). Set the Width:Height ratio to 4:3 or 16:9 (Picture 2). Now you can move and resize the cropping frame on the image and confirm with "Crop" button. In this step you can directly enter the final pixel size to have an exact size cropping frame. Otherwise move to the next step.
Adjust image size.
If your image is larger or smaller than the final screen resolution, then use the "Resize/Resample" button and enter the final image size (Picture 3). Now you can save the final image and use it as wallpaper.

Artistic Desktop

Et voila! Here are some brushcloth wallpapers.

You can download the images adjusted to 1024x768 and 1280x800 resolution.