If your work is too big to scan and you don’t feel confident to photograph it and get a good result, what do you do? Well, obviously you can scan your art multiple times making certain each corner is scanned and any middle sections that the scanner didn’t reach. You now have multiple images so what do you do with these? I used to use “Gimp”, a free image manipulation program, and rotate the scans and stitch them together. Though I was quite quick at the process it was still fairly laborious and difficult to explain to anyone new to image manipulation. Microsoft Ice to the rescue.

Here’s an example of how to use this program.

As can be seen from the images below, I have simply pointed my camera out from my verandah and clicked away randomly. These are the images straight off my camera, shown in ‘Windows Explorer’

(Click on the images if you want to see them larger)

You will notice that, just for fun, I took one photograph upside down and two on their sides to show how well this program works.

Click this link.

You install the program from that link, then it asks you to install something else to make it work, and then you try to install it again and it asks you to install something else. Then you try for the third time and you finally have everything you need. This may be different on different computers but on my old thing, that’s what happened. Not to worry, no malicious stuff comes with it.

Open the program (“Microsoft Ice”), click “file/new panorama” and then navigate to your scans.

Highlight all your scans (in this case photographs) and hit ‘open’. As soon as you do this, it starts to solve the jigsaw puzzle. It shuffles everything into place for you, it rotates ones that are upside down or on their side (or more importantly it rotates by degree ones that are just a little off)

As you can see, my aiming was extremely random because the image below is not exactly well composed. I even missed a bit in the middle which would have really given the program a workout

Click “Export to Disk” and it will save a jpg of the image.

You can crop it in this program or in any of your other programs.

To make this more relevant than a silly panorama of my roof line, this tiger is too large for my scanner to do in one go so it is from four scans (each corner) and in just a few seconds, I had a perfectly stitched image. Thank you to the developers.