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Many personal printers with scanners at home rarely see the scanner part get used. Besides printing your digital art, documents, and photos, your scanner itself can create digital art from reality, and here are a few great ideas you might want to try.
Scanner Art: An Underrated Technique
A flatbed scanner is basically a very slow camera that has a very small focal distance and no edge distortion. The way it specializes in capturing a completely flat, 2D plane opens up plenty of opportunities for unique creations.
you’re able to play with the movement of the scanner, the shallow depth of field, or even its planar nature. You’re not limited to printing your scans immediately as well; if you save your scans as images, you can use them as assets for digital art.
Here are a few ideas you might want to try out for yourself…
1. Create Custom Digital Textures With a Scanner
Whether it’s for Canva, Photoshop, or digital scrapbooking, sometimes it’s really hard to find the right overlay, texture, or object online. If you have an object with the desired texture and want to turn it digital, a scanner is the perfect tool.
This blot and scan technique can be used for many scenarios, like tire marks, flowers, leaves, fabric, etc. There’s a lot you can do to create custom textures and overlays. A great example of this technique is used by contemporary artist Joe Boyd as can be seen in the video above.
2. Turn Your Handwriting Into a Font
Your penmanship is something incredibly unique to you. If you want to make your handwriting into a font to use in your prints, designs, programs, or even as a custom font for your phone, the scanner is a very helpful tool to make it happen.
Compared to taking images of your handwriting on your phone, which will have distortion on the edges and skew the letters, a scanner is much better suited for this task. For a more detailed guide, check outhow to turn your handwriting into a font.
You can personalize your letters, documents, and many other creative applications where you’d like to add your own personal touch. Our favorite example is for typing out a child’s birthday invitations. Your child’s handwriting in a font would be so cute!
3. Scanner Photography
This may seem like an odd choice of device to use for photography, but a scanner does indeed take photos. A scanner scans lines across its plane, resulting in a photo with no edge distortion or fish-eye effect. Scanography can often result in pretty surreal images that will confuse the viewer as to how it was taken.
Christian Staebleris one such example of an artist who uses flatbed scanners to create his photos. Christian uses plants, animals, and insects to create his still-life photos; I tried mixing scans with my photography to create some surrealistic images. This one is called: You Are the Monopoly Board.
You can alsoscan old film and photos, allowing you to use them in your digital scrapbook. Maybe add a little distortion while it scans to give you an edgier, abstract scan. There are more ways you can play with this and this is one of the most open-ended ways to play with a flatbed scanner.
4. Turn Old Newspapers and Magazines Into Art Assets
Old magazines often have very bold, eye-catching colors. In contrast, newspapers often have drab, muted colors; both are perfect for different types of applications.
Cutting up the newspapers and magazines to get the colors, letters, shapes, and images that you want is a great way to gather assets for your next project. you may use them to add interesting backgrounds or layers to your images like in this example:
Or, just like Joe Boyd once again, use the magazines as the base of your artwork. Another way to make use of magazine photos is to distort some of the images as you’re scanning to create a more edgy, surreal effect to the scan.
If you thought your scanner would never see more use than just photocopying your documents and IDs, think again. The next time you hit the scan button, try to leave the lid open and look around the room for things to scan. You never know when these tricks will come in handy.
