Enlarging the Fantastic Garden sketch

As usual, I'm ahead on the project and behind on reporting!

Fantastic Garden reference sketch at 1/4 scale

The large woodblocks for our Fantastic Garden will be here this week; I'm so excited about that!
Since we got enough participants so fast, this means I can get ahead of the game a little bit and start transferring the drawing to the larger blocks. "Transferring" is a misnomer in this case because I actually re-draw the sketch on the blocks. Why? you ask? Well, the sketch is all good and charming but when creating the actual drawing I have to make sure that the "puzzle pieces" that each participant will receive is a block that can be designed and carved. This means no skinny blocks, no tiny blocks, in general, no "difficult" blocks.
So I adjust the design as I go along to make sure that:
1. I can actually jig-saw into doable pieces and,
2. All the pieces are roughly 5-6 inches in diameter and of a shape that is welcoming to unique designs for my friends

I made a slide show/video about how to make your own enlargements from a standard printer. Basically, I start out by going to my favorite imaging program, Adobe Photoshop, and dividing the sketch into printable chunks. My image was 22 x 30 inches so I divided into 8 sheets, each printable on my standard printer at 8.5 x 11 inches. Just select an area print size, and then use the "print selection" command to print just that area. Overlapping the image is necessary because later I will glue together and need to know how to align it. Repeat 8 times!

Here is a slide show and video of the rest of the process:

On another front, I have now finished carving the About the Pond doodle key block and tomorrow will make a slide show of the progress, transfer the key to the color blocks and make a little video of that process.

Onward and upward!

Fantastic Garden Headquarters: http://puzzleprints.blogspot.com