Engineering Print Art Tutorial (in which I bring a little bit of the farm to the city)

October 4, 2012 by Anne 12 Comments

Yesterday I made the apartment feel a little more homey. Well, at least for me. Kenny would probably have felt more at home here if I had done this project with a picture of a city skyline with some smog or a traffic jam or something.

Well, he can feel more at home when he starts pulling his own and making his own crafts.

I’d like to see the day.

Although actually, one of our first dates was a Christmas craft party. I think he made a paper chain. Thus, I will put him to work at Christmas. 🙂

On to the project, which sprang from two sources: one, the never-ending goodness that is Pinterest, and two, the incredibleness that is my sister.

If she had a blog, I would link to her…perhaps soon. I’m rooting for it, at least. Who needs time to do homework and stuff? Pshaw.

Anyway, she takes great photos, mainly of our farm. My mom has a super blog about our farm, which I linked to here. And my sister seems to like animals a bit //understatement of the century//, so many of her photos are along those lines. There was one I particularly love, here:

This is one of our horses, Duke. The other one is Skittles and she is white, so I’m assuming she’s in there somewhere, just camouflaged in the fog or something.

On Pinterest, there are a ton of sweet art projects that incorporate engineering prints, which are normally used for blueprints and stuff like that but that the craft world has twisted to use in our favor. Katie Bower has an example of this craft on her blog.

So after calling Staples and talking to Don in the printing center to confirm he could actually do this without claiming my firstborn, I packed up my flash drive and headed on over to get this:

It cost $6.99 and looks awesome. There are printer lines through it all running horizontally, but I actually think that makes it look better in this case.

I also had been hoarding these pieces of styrofoam for such a time as this:

See, Kenny? You never know when huge styrofoam sheets will come in handy.

To make a long story short, I trimmed and attached the styrofoam together with some tape and glue, and then trimmed the printed picture to the size of the styrofoam. When you cut styrofoam, it is very messy. Unfortunately, coming to work covered in those little white styrofoam balls might not give people the most professional impression, so I tried to keep my arms fully extended as a wielded a very very sharp utility knife and hacked away. I only partially succeeded, so I’ll take this opportunity to apologize in advance to my coworkers for bringing the styrofoam infestation to work with me tomorrow…

Next, I painted the edges with some free paint I got a while ago:

Then I stuck some double-sided tape all over:

This next step was not for the faint of heart. It also helps to have a husband who is like Curious George to come over and help you place the photo on the sticky tape, exactly where you want it. And yes, we’re still married! Success.