Practice With Scanning and Embellishment

I: Original acrylic painting on sketch pad

✠ [NOTE: These are my open notes of my progress with both my artistic and typesetting skills. It'll be raw and (mostly) unedited. The point is to keep track of and (stay accountable to) my goals! Please leave a comment: I'd love some constructive criticism as I go!]  ✠

Dearest Reader,

This evening, I did not have any plans whatsoever. I knew this would be a perfect time to dust off my old printer, see if it still works, and even begin some illuminated letter practice!

The good news is that the printer does turn on! the bad news is that I will need to purchase some new cartridges before I can print those letter practice sheets.

That said, I did make some use out of old Epson. Taking a few older paintings of mine, I sandwiched them into the scanner, shoved in my thumb drive, and let her rip with the highest resolution she could! I then reinserted the flash drive into my desktop and downloaded them as PDFs. After that, I used freeconvert.com to convert the PDFs into JPGs, to keep their resolution and edit them to my liking.

One of those paintings in particular [Image I], a vine with reddish leaves, has been hanging on my wall for close to a year now. Though it's only a concept at this point, a little "two-edge" border like this would look lovely in a prayerbook! So I started experimenting with how to insert the image into Word.

II: Final version of this particular vine design

The best result I achieved today [Image II] involved turning the JPG into a PNG. I did this by auto-removing the background with Microsoft Designer, which gave me the option to save a copy as a PNG. After this, I increased the sharpness and saturation in order to brighten the colors and black lines. I then reoriented the design for every possible orientation (flipped and rotated) and saved those copies: for different kinds of pages/media I want to embellish with this vibrant vine!

The most challenging part of this mini project was dealing with Word. After inserting the image itself with the minimum possible page margins for Word (.12 inches), I sent the image to the back and inserted a textbox on the page. From there, I pasted in my personal Morning Offering (a tiny sneak peak from The Warriors Prayerbook!): controlling the margins of the text so it wouldn't butt up against the vine. While I'm overall happy with the result [Image III], I was not allowed to format Drop Caps inside of the text box, which was a bit disappointing. Perhaps a higher-end graphic/text block design software can do this instead. If you are a graphic designer, let me know if you're aware of this feature in other programs! Thanks!

III: Note the first word 'LORD'. I normally I like to use Royal .ttf font to drop-cap the 'L'

Besides making this reflection, that was about all I did today for this endeavor. Any artwork or prayers in this post are mine own, but you are free to copy and use what you like! The point of my work is to help others grow closer to Jesus Christ, not to gatekeep the beauty for greater profit. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to making another progress report soon! Remember: Jesus is King, Mary is Queen, and you are their slaves! God bless!

✠︎ Your fellow Papist,

Andy Christopher