Making Artwork Come to Life

Have you ever made a painting or had one lying around and thought that it would be so much cooler if it came to life? Then you came to the right place. This touch interactive painting can let you bring any type of picture you want come to life with sounds. It could be any type of painting, like a scenery with sounds of animals or the wind blowing or it could be a painting with instruments or a cool pattern with the sounds of instruments.

I had created this project for my Advanced Tech class at school, this was a really fun and cool project to make. The ending product works really well and it feels just like your there in the painting.

What you need is...

• A canvas it can be any size you want it to be, it would be better if it was a wooden canvas because people will be touch it and regular canvases can rip.
• Paint you want to make sure that its good paint that won't come off easily.
• Paint brushes
• Solder
• Solder iron
• Wire
• Wire cutters
• Copper tape
• Makey Makey
• Utility knife
• Alligator clips
• Sounds for your painting

The first thing you need to do is to come up with a design you think would be cool to have sounds added to it. The painting can be any thing you want it can be a scenery, a pattern, it could even be instruments. Before you paint it on your canvas you should lightly draw it out on the canvas and make sure you have everything in the places you want it to go and that you are happy with your design. Once you are happy with your design and is happy with where everything is placed you can start to paint it onto the canvas.

For my design I had went with a night scenery with animals and the water in the background. I had decided that I had wanted to do a scenery because I thought that it would have more of an impact if it was a scenery with the sounds of animals and water in the background.

After you get your painting done and the paint is dry you need to draw circles or squares where you want you painting to be interactive. On my painting I put mine under the animals and one on the water because I had the sounds of the animals and an ocean sound. Once you know where you want to add the sounds you need to take a utility knife and cut out the circles you had put on the painting. once you have that done you can place the copper tape over the hole and you can start to solder.

In order to get the solder to stick to the copper tape better you should put on Soldering Paste Flux. When you go to solder the wire to the copper tape you need to make sure that the solder is thick enough to cover the wire. If you have a thicker wire and think solder it will be harder to solder the wire to the copper tape.

Once the solder iron is heated up you should add a piece of solder to the copper tape then add the wire to it and add more solder to the top of the wire.

To get the sounds you can record them yourself or you can download them from the internet. To get the sounds to play from the painting when you touch it I used a Makey Makey, this is a very easy board to use its easy to figure out and you can do a lot of things with it. To program the Makey Makey I used Scratch, this is really good site to use if you never coded anything before. Scratch is a very easy site to use, you can upload a lot of different sounds on it, and you can edit the sounds after you upload them.

All you have to do to program the Makey Makey is have each wire connected to the Makey Makey, for this you can use alligator clips, when you do this you want to use different colored clips attached to each wire so that you can know which sounds to put with what wires so the sounds match up with the image it is. For mine I had a sound be the up, down, left, and right arrow key, and I had it on the space bar. so depending on how many sounds you have you could have more clips running to it.

Once you have your sounds uploaded and edited, then you can begin to program you board. To start you want to go into the events tab, and you will see tabs you can pull over. You want to pull over the tab that has a key that says when space key pressed and you can choose what key to press when you hover the mouse over the the triangle. Then you want to hit the sound tab that on the top. You will see more tabs that says play sound meow, you want to hover the mouse over the triangle and you can pick you sound then place it under when space key pressed. You want to do that until you have all your sounds with each key and you want to make sure you have the sounds to match with the right image.

Once you have that done you need to attach a grounder and you can test out your painting.

So the last thing you can do is touch up your painting if there is spots where you need to and you need to find a space to set it up. The only thing about this is in order to run the Makey Makey it has to be plugged into a computer, so you will need to set it up in a spot by a computer or where ever you can put a laptop. Other than that your touch interactive painting is done.