Self Portrait

Made with a home made scanner

and a Tektronix Pen Plotter

      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.
Blue Reuben Reyes Brown Reuben Reyes
Click on either picture to get a bigger image.