When I was in school, owning a flatbed scanner was a distant dream for most of us due to the massive cost. Computer graphics were strictly limited, but I was completely hooked. As soon as I got my first PC, I skipped saving up for a commercial scanner and decided to build one myself. Armed with custom circuit designs and a bag of parts from RadioShack, I pieced together my own scanning contraption and wrote the code to bring it to life. What you see here is one of my first successful scans. It was a slow process—taking a full hour just to scan an 8x10 image in black and white. To inject some color, I translated the grayscale into pseudocolor and programmed a pen plotter to draw the final product. The piece on the right is the raw original. That yellow gradient in the background? A total mistake. The yellow pen ran out of ink mid-plot, but the gradient looked so good I decided to keep it. On the left is the modern cleanup, where I refreshed the image and shifted the color palette to blue.
Click on either picture to get a bigger image.