Self Portrait
Made with a home made scanner
and a Tektronix Pen Plotter
      Back when i was in school flat bed scanners did exist but were very expensive, and
very few people had one.   I was very much fascinated by graphics but what
could be done on a computer was very limited.   Shortly after I bought
my own PC, I decided to make my own scanner and hook it up to my PC.   I
designed the circuits I would need to make a scanner and bought the
parts at RadioShack.   After assembling, I hooked up the contraption to
the PC. Wrote some code to test and make the scanner work.   This
is one of many examples that I scanned.   The scanner took about 1
hour to scan an 8 by 10 picture and was only gray scale (no color).   To
add color I converted the gray scales from the original image to color
(psudocolor).   I then wrote a program to
control a pen plotter.   The original image I did is on the
right.   The yellow background gradient is a mistake.   The yellow pen
I used ran out of ink before it finished, but I liked the effect and kept
it.   The image on the left has been cleaned up and color hue shifted to look
blue.
Click on either picture to get a bigger image.