Photocopy Science
Posted on March 30, 2006
Filed Under Resources, Printing |
I lifted this stuff from http://www.idiotthewise.com/, a street art site from Jerusalem. They’ve got lots of other street art related info on there too so check em out!
THE PHOTOCOPIER AS A WEAPON OF SUBVERSION . .
Get access to a photocopier. It has to be one with an enlargement function. Some will only enlarge up to 141%- that is, it will turn an A4 into an A3. Others might go 200%, the best copiers will go 400%. Try to find one of these. Universities & Arts centres might be a good place to start looking
The most accessible and cheapest machines have a set enlargement button; that gives 141% Why 141%- well, it’s a dimension that always retains the relative dimensions of the two sides (that’s why A4 paper is the size it is). Really. Divide the length of an A4 by its width and you get 1.41. Width divided by length is 0.71. What it means practically is that if you take an A4 and blow it up 141% it becomes an A3. An A3 blown up 141% again doubles in size exactly (to become an A2). And so on, A1, AO etc.
Doing this you can take a graphic on A3 and keep doubling (141%) each half of the paper the copier spits out and watch it grow to the size you want.
No problem. Except that this is incredibly wasteful of paper, and time consuming (though quite straightforward). If you can get at a copier that goes up in 400% steps then you’ll be able to miss out all the stages in between.
To explain this method, take an A4 piece of paper. Fold it. It is now 71% of its size (an A5 in fact, which enlarged by 141%, will be the A4 again). Fold the paper again- that’s 50% (an A6- put a picture this size on a copier and blow it up 200% and it magically becomes an A4 once more). Now fold twice more and it will be one sixteenth the area of the original A4, the sides being a quarter of the original. If you unfold it, it’ll have grid marks on it. This is the essence of 400% enlargement.
Easy so far, eh? So do the same origami with an A3. Now get your graphic as big as you can on an A3. Turn it over and draw lines onto it to make it into quarters, and then again into sixteenths (like you done with the folding lark above). You can then cut the picture up and have sixteen little bits of paper- don’t lose them! Each one of these you blow up 397% (not 400%- you don’t want to lose any of the graphic off the edges) and hey presto you’ve now got 16 A3 jigsaw pieces which, when put together, makes you a big fuck off poster 1.6 metres x 1.1 metres. If you start with an original made up of four or more A3’s you got big enough to cover whole billboards (or building). [Laser copiers will do this sectioning for you- its called ‘tiling’- they spew out all the pieces from an uncut A3.]
If you can only get to a copier that goes 200% then you have to quarter the picture, blow it up then quarter each quarter again- if you see what I mean. You can paste all the tiles together indoors with PVA/Copydex/Water soluble glue like you used in school (or Sellotape on the back). You can redo bits in coloured paper; pick out bits using coloured toner; or paint on it; the limits are your imagination. Mind you, don’t try to paste up graphics any bigger than 2m x 1m; if your message is larger, make it up of big chunks and butt the sections together as they go up.
If you want to fit something over an irregular size picture then you have to measure up the original and work backwards. Draw up a sketch of what you want to subvert and see how to fit A3’s into it. Stare at it long enough and it becomes apparent.
For lettering, you can do letraset and keep blowing it up, but again it’s wasteful. Either paint your slogan on paper or better still, find a computer and do the alphabet, one letter on each A4 printout. These are your originals, don’t paste them up. When you want a slogan take each letter in turn on a copier and blow them up. With a computer you should be able to find the exact right typeface as is already on the billboard.
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