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.