Test Scan

The Explorers Club - Stage West and WaterTower Theater

set design by Clare Floyd DeVries

There!  The first successful scan from my brand new large format scanner.

Ain't tech wonderful?

I love the way prices keep dropping(if in this realm only), because a few years ago an 11" x 17" (almost) scanner like this one cost over a thousand dollars and now it's less than $200 .  Finally I can afford to scan my sketches in One Piece, instead of in halfsies.

Scanning images at your desk is a help to any visual artist, but as a set designer who often works an hour or two away from the guys and gals  at the theater who need the drawing, it's a life-saver... as in my-life-wasted-one-hour-in-the-car at a time.   Sometimes one quick and quickly scanned picture really can be worth a thousand words over the phone when trying to explain a fix.

What other tech is actually really useful in this biz?

Cell phones, because of the find-you-anywhere ability.  Though I hate to admit it, texting is actually useful in a theater context because often you need to discuss an issue but can't talk because rehearsal.  Email is my preference because you can better, more fully discuss issues and Bonus! no nagging electronic bleeps.  Email is easier to ignore until you have real time to think and respond.

Copiers.  Blessed copiers.  I'm old enough to remember the early versions of photo-copiers with their damp, dirty results.  (Oh, the old toner disasters!  Filthy ook-dust everywhere!)  I remember - and can still smell - the old Diazo printers and their ammonia - a system which only worked to copy drawings on translucent materials.  (My first architecture job involved an unventilated basement tending a Diazo machine.)  In the pre-photo-copier age, if you wanted text copied you wrote it out yourself and, to copy a picture on opaque paper or from a book, you traced it.

Barbarism.

All hail the age of big cheap scanners!