Many years ago, when I lived in London, I was visiting a local printer for a reason I have long forgotten, Christmas was not far off and whilst I was in there chatting with them, I noticed they had some Christmas cards that were quite striking and I commented on it. The cards were theirs (to be sent to their clients, with Christmas wishes) and they happily told me how they had made the image. The image was of Christmas tree shapes that had a green hue to it and all the small trees seemed quite randomly scattered across the image. These small Christmas trees were in fact raw pasta!
That image and idea has stuck with me over all these years, and I’m sure they weren’t the first people to have tried this and I’m quite sure many, many people have had similar ideas and using a flatbed scanner, which is what they used, has been a tool for art and similar work countless times.
One of my friends – Deborah Samuels has used a flatbed scanner in the wonderful work she creates and it has also inspired me to try my own ideas using my scanner. Though the image of the Christmas trees from long ago lay dormant in my mind all these many years, the factor that woke it was an idea to make images of blown light bulbs of different shapes and sizes, either placed at random or purposefully on my own scanner. All I needed were a good selection of light bulbs and those I had in plentiful supply.
I have access to a source for blown light bulbs, so I was soon able to put together a good selection and the summer of last year, when I had enough, I started! As soon as I started more ideas started flowing and the light bulbs were just the first!
I’ll pause here, for a minute to fill you in on a detail which is important to this story…I have often written that it’s not about (expensive) gear and I still stand by that. In this instance the scanner I was using I bought second hand in 2010 for the princely sum of C$20 and for a moment I will stop to tell you a little about it.
The scanner is a venerable old HP Scanjet G4010 (2007), it’s in pretty good condition, but there are marks on the glass and along with the inevitable amount of dust during scanning, despite no amount of cleaning, results in a good amount of cleaning to the resulting digital files. You’ll find ways to deal with and speed up the cleaning process! The scanner however, is not fast and the whole process of making a single image from start to finish – clean, scan, clean, edit does take up to an hour or two depending on my subject. A good deal of that time was invested in cleaning and “spotting” the files, but I feel that it was worth the effort – now, not whilst I was doing it! You’d be amazed at the amount of dust and lint when you zoom in close! This summer I did take glass off and clean it, removing most of the stains but there are still some marks on the glass that I couldn’t remove. I did also purchase an Epson V800, again second hand, in great condition with all it’s bits and also in great condition, did I mention that! Another point here is also that higher resolution scans result in larger files, more resolution and the fact that you’ll see and find even more dust and lint as a result!
Back to the scans…you’ll find all manner of interesting objects and subjects to scan along with interesting ways to conduct your scanning and you could devote a huge amount of time with this very interesting form of media and art creation. Once again, I’ll mention projects, as this is another form for presenting ideas for your work. One of the ideas I had a go at was scanning some Bleeding Heart flowers I took from my garden and making scans with a single strand left on the glass – scanning them several times over a period of a two weeks, as they dried, wilted and their colour and character changed.
It didn’t feel and indeed it wasn’t enough to leave some of the images as plain scans, and I felt inclined to do some post editing on some of them with the view to make them more presentable as viewable images for showing to people, images in a gallery on my website.
One of my ideas, was to roll coloured marbles along the glass as the scan was taking place, there was another idea, but I’ll mention that idea in a later post as it involves another piece of gear I picked up very cheaply. The marbles do warrant more time and effort, the single scan I made was just a start of an idea. A future project that I do plan to pursue, but requires a good deal of thought and time is to do “A Picture of My Life”, which I’ll get around to sometime soon, I hope.
It's also my hope that I have given you an idea that your camera is not the only piece of equipment you may have to capture images and grow your own ideas. I do feel for the C$20 (I paid) and a little time, effort, thought and creativity, your investment can yield some interesting results.