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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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 :)

Final Size.

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

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.

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.

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.

Put It Up.

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

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 :)