Enlarging an image for a hand-painted poster, part 1

Let’s say that in a small bout of insanity you decide to sing a song you wrote for a friend’s drag show as your entry for Really Matters Theater, and part of that song involves the neon sign of Miss Ella’s nightclub, the Kingfisher Club.

Let’s say further that part of the song — and an execrable pun — requires the appearance of said sign, “flashing in purple and green and in gold.”

You could create an image and take it to some print or photo place to have that image enlarged onto a piece of foamboard, but paying what that would cost would be dumb for this one-off performance.

Here’s a solution.

First, back in the day when it was okay for those kids to be on my lawn, I used a graphics program that allowed me to “tile” a large image, by which I mean that I could design a 24”x36” poster and tell the program to split it up and print it onto regular letter-size paper. From there I could trim and tape the image together. [Full disclosure: I don’t remember which program it was, and for all I know that program still exists and still tiles.]

The graphics program I am currently using does not have that capability. (For the record, Pixelmator Pro is otherwise the bomb!) So here’s what I did:

Step 1

Create your image for the poster. Mine was 30”x20”. Draw lines where the letter-size paper would be. (Guidelines, the ones you drag out from the rulers, don’t move with the image.)

Group everything into one big group.

Step 2

In Pixelmator Pro, you can resize the image — all those things you just grouped together — which is handy for downsizing images for online use, and, separately, you can resize the canvas, the size of the workspace in which that image is displayed.

Here, in Canvas Size, you can see the original size of 30” x 20”.

Resize the canvas to 8.5” x 11”.

Don’t worry, you haven’t lost any of your design. See how it’s still there, floating in the universe outside the window of 8.5”x11”?

Also notice that the window is in the center of the design. Hold that thought.

Step 3

Back in the workspace, get your grabber tool and drag your image over so that the upper left corner of the design is at the edge of your canvas.

Oops, you forgot to group all that stuff into one big glob, didn’t you? Ctrl-Z to put whatever you dragged back in the right place, now group all that stuff into one big glob. Drag the image, etc etc.

You now have a printable letter-size image.

My laptop’s printer software always tries to reduce the image to fit onto the page, which is fine, I guess, although I’m always having to tell it just to print my thing at 100%, please.

This time I didn’t notice and everything printed out at something like 94.1% — and that turned out to be better since it squished each page into a ¼” margin, making it easier to trim and overlap and tape everything together.

Anyway, print that first page, drag the image over to the next “page” and print, repeat.

You may find it necessary or more convenient to adjust your letter-size guides to print the bottom half, depending on your design. I had the two words and found it easier to treat them as separate printouts, so I moved my guides to do that. If I had had a full poster image, I would have just printed out the tiled panels as originally delineated.

Pro tip: When you trim the edges of your printouts, leave one side of each page untrimmed (preferably the same side throughout) to make it easier to align and tape the next page.

NEXT UP: Transferring the image