Making miniature printies

One thing I absolutely love making in miniature is the contemporary items found readily around my home; paper ephemera, food packets, pet stuff...

It's important, to me anyway, to have it look exactly as it should if it was possible to shrink an everyday item and to do this, I scan everything. And I mean everything. I have a Canon MG7550 printer/scanner which I use daily.

This is how I make miniature prints.

I'm going to scan and print a miniature crisp packet. I've chosen it because they're literally the worst 😄 . They're nearly always foil, reflective and easily wrinkled so anything else you scan after will be a breeze.

First off, I scoff the contents of the crisp packet, (best part of the process). Then I cut the bag open and wash the inside to clean the crisp residue off. It's important to cut away any part of the bag which is deformed from the heat sealing process - generally the top, bottom and back. It's also a good idea to avoid cutting through text or an image. I try to cut through block colours and remove as little as possible because I need to jigsaw those missing parts back.

I use a hard board the size of the scanner bed and wrap the packet around it to keep it as flat as possible.

I scan it at 300dpi which picks up a lot of detail...too much really for what I need. But I've found that when you finish and scale it down to miniature size, it retains the detail better. Most items won't scan in one go, so you may have to move the packet around and scan as many parts as needed to make the whole item.

All of the seperate images are saved to my computer and opened in Photoshop. If you're reading this, looking for a tutorial for making your own miniature printies, this may be the place where you say 'well I can't afford/ don't have photoshop so this is a waste of time' and I get that. But there are a huge amount of free to download programs that have similar capabilities. Like everything in miniature, you have to decide if you want to put in the time to learn something new or rely on others to get the things you want.

I always start top left and add guide lines (pale blue lines in the screenshot) to work from. You want the finished product to fold squarely, especially boxes, so the right angles have to be exactly 90°.

I keep adding the parts, making them transparent so that I can match the preceding layer. Depending on the graphics program you use, there are a huge number of tools to help line up the images like rotate, warp and skew. Once all of the layers, (separate images), are lined up I combine the image into one.

 

In the short video, I'm setting out the edge of the packet and using the paintfill tool to even out any wrinkles/tears picked up on the scan. I won't lie to you, this is time consuming. However, imagine if you're making a miniature shop and need dozens of the same item, then this, financially, is a good way to save the pennies. 

 

You can also find images on the internet to help jigsaw the image together. Amazon is a good place to start - they tend to have clear, high definition pictures of the products for sale. In the photograph above, I cropped an image from Amazon to help me replace a badly distorted label.

If the writing is damaged during the scan, you can easily match and replace the font in your image.

It took me around two hours to do this. The way I see it, I would probably pay someone around £1 each for a miniature version and if I needed twenty for a shop counter...well it makes sense to do-it-yourself if you can.

The last thing to do is adjust the size. I always save the full scale version in case anyone ask me for a different scaled version. Scaling to 12th scale in Photoshop is simple. Lock the aspect ratio and scale to 8.33% of the original size.

I'm not an expert in Photoshop but I know enough to get by. I'm happy to help if you want to leave a comment.

Next post - how I print and fold miniature food packets.

TTFN

Pepper