I learned about the Rasterbator recently and was immediately intrigued. I knew that we were moving soon at work when I first found out about it so I immediately started thinking about how I could rasterbate all over the place.

For those of you who are too lazy to follow the link above and are wondering what the Rasterbator is and what it does it’s quite simple. With the Rasterbator you can take any picture you want and blow it up to any size that you want; you can make them HUGE. What the program actually does it blows the image up to whatever size you want and then spits out a PDF file. This PDF has however many pages that you specified for the size of your image, you then print the pages of this PDF on your every day computer printer, you can do either color or black and white, on regular 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper and once everything is printed you put all the pieces together to make a much bigger image.

While I had all sorts of ideas of what I wanted to do at work I knew that I had to be a bit careful if I wanted to be able to keep it up and not get in any trouble. I narrowed my choices down to about 5 but I finally ended up going with an image from The Shining. Below is a picture of it from about 15 feet away.

It turned out good, not great but good. I learned a lot doing my first Rasterbation. Tip 1: Use the highest resolution source image you can find, the bigger the better is the deal here. Mine looks good but I know it would look better if I had used a higher resolution source image. Tip 2: if you are going to cut out all the white parts between the sheets of paper you want to make sure that you cut your lines as straight as possible and keep all of your pieces of paper a uniform size. I had no problem keeping my cuts straight thanks do this awesome little toy that a woman at work let me borrow, this thing was a life saver. my problem was that I didn’t keep the pieces of paper the same exact size. Even if the pieces of paper are just a bit different in size it will screw you up when you tape everything back together, mine were close by my finished rasterbation has some little errors and doesn’t exactly lie flat against the wall.

Here is a close up of my image, you can click the image for a larger version.

And here is a real close up to show you what the image looks like up close (where it loses it’s magic).

Pretty cool huh? I am thinking I am going to leave it up at work for a month or two and then make a new one and try and keep the cycle going. That is assuming that work doesn’t make me take it down which I hope they don’t.

You should check out the gallery at the official Rasterbator web page, they have some really cool images.