April 13, 2010 12:15 AM UTC

Make your own 2D candidates!

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• by: NeonNurse

We had special guest stars at the Prowers County Assembly Saturday! (Hillary was there too, but she went home with our County Chair, who’s a big fan.)

I used shareware called Poster (you can download it from cnet.com, free trial, $18 for the full version, no I get no kickback for promoting it) to make your own. The attendees had a blast with them, taking each others’ pictures with their favorites and pretending to chat with them.

I recycled some leftover corrugated plastic signs (h/t Jim Bowen!) and cut them out with a Dremel, but of course thought of easier ways later.

You have to start with the largest sized digital photo you can find. The bigger and sharper it is, the better. Choosing one where your subject is wearing light colored clothes will save you some ink or toner.

The program divides your pic up into a grid. You can print the whole thing, or just the squares you need, as I did here. You can make it as large as you want. I chose a standard height of 3 feet, which accounts for the perspective difference. The idea was to ‘seat’ them at the tables at our banquet.

What I will do next time (besides starting sooner so I will have a better chance of getting ideal photos) is make a first layer by rubber cementing the grid squares (they overlap, by the way) onto poster board. I had a little bleed through problem with the signs in some spots. That way I can cut them out with ordinary scissors. If they need to be more rigid, I will lay them out on cardboard, trace around them, cut the cardboard separately and then glue the pics down. The Dremel cuts fast, but it’s easy to make mistakes.

Really, if I can do it, anyone can! Then you can have fun like we did, as seen in this pic I call Three Mikes, No Waiting!

(That’s my son MrMike, SD-1 candidate Mike Bowman, and of course 2D Mike Bennet.)