Photo & Flat Drawing Poster
Hand it a photograph and it returns a poster in two halves — the picture on top, the same things drawn beneath it in flat colour, countable one against the other. Three fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a beached fishing boat and a red bicycle against a wall, drawn two ways: flat acrylic blocks on one, a thin line with two marker colours on the other. Both photos are full of things nobody named, and neither drawing includes any of them.
You get a poster with your photo on top and, beneath it, only the things you name, drawn in flat colour, with exactly the three lines of text you type. Anything you leave out does not appear, even if it is in the photo. The drawing sits small on plenty of bare paper, though not as small as asked: expect it at about three fifths of the width it has in the photo, not a third.
Generated for this library
Input
In the photo a wooden fishing boat, and a coil of rope
beside it
Drawn as flat acrylic blocks with a thin unsteady
ink line
Words title THE LONG SHORE · under it Winter
Crossing · foot SALT AND SHINGLE
Photograph boat-beach.png (1254 x 940)
Returned 1 poster · 3:4 · halved 1:1
top the photograph, graded, extended to the frame -
the boat itself unstretched and unmoved
bottom two things listed, two things drawn: the boat,
and the rope at its bow - no shingle, no sea
size 90% of the lower half is bare paper - but the
boat is wider than the third it was held to
colour four flats, all lifted from the picture above -
hull blue, wet timber, shingle grey, paper
words the three lines given and nothing else - no
year, no number, no place nobody typedYou fill in 3 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1What is in the photograph, thing by thing
- 2How the lower half is drawn
- 3The words, and where each one goes
Photo & Flat Drawing Poster
What this makes
Hand it a photograph and it returns a poster in two halves — the picture on top, the same things drawn beneath it in flat colour, countable one against the other. Three fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach your photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the three FIELDS lines. In the first, list the things separately — that list is what the drawing is checked against.
- Count before shipping: every thing in the drawing should be a thing you can point to in the photograph, and there should be the same number of them. That is the check this template is built around.
- Write the words yourself in the third field, in whatever language you want them. Anything you do not write does not appear.
What you swap
- What is in the photograph, thing by thing
- a wooden fishing boat, and a coil of rope beside it
- How the lower half is drawn
- flat acrylic blocks with a thin unsteady ink line
- The words, and where each one goes
- title THE LONG SHORE · under it Winter Crossing · foot SALT AND SHINGLE
Before it runs
- An actual photograph, attached to the message. There is nothing here for a description to work on — the lower half is a drawing *of* the upper half, so without a picture there is nothing to draw.
- A photograph with countable things in it. Two or three objects that can be named separately is the shape this works on; a crowd, a forest or a pattern has nothing to hold a one-to-one correspondence against.
- Room above and below the subject. The frame becomes 3:4 and the photograph fills the top half of it, so a picture cropped tight to its subject has to be extended to fit, and extending is where a horizon goes wrong.
- Your own words, or none. The template will not invent a title, a year or a series number, which means a poster with nothing in the third field comes back with nothing written on it.
When to reach for it
When a photograph has to become something worth pinning up: a travel print, a shop's own poster, a cover for a set of pictures. Templates in this style ask for the most recognisable subject, highly distilled, and hand back a traced copy of the photograph with an invented year and a series number under it.
What changes
- One photograph in, one poster out — 3:4, halved exactly, the picture above and a drawing of it below.
- The drawing holds exactly the things you listed, in the same number and the same order, so the two halves can be counted against each other — and no scenery the photograph happened to contain.
- The drawn subject is held to a third of the width it spans in the photograph above, which is a comparison the poster can be checked against rather than a fraction that never binds.
- At most four flat colours, all sampled from the photograph above, so the halves belong to one picture.
- The only words on it are the words you gave it — every position you leave empty stays empty.
Pairs with
- Hand-Drawn Photo DoodlesHand it a photograph and it draws over the top of it — every doodle attached to a thing you named and doing one job to it, the photograph underneath untouched. Three fields.
- Backlit Silhouette EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as a cut silhouette lit from behind — no interior anywhere, so every part that has to be recognised must reach the edge and show itself against the light. Two fields.
- Chalkboard Drawing EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back drawn in chalk on a black board — where the darkest thing in the picture is bare board, because chalk adds light and there is no way to draw a dark line. Two fields.