Does it scale?

After my small experiment with the Firefox logo (about 800 stickers), I wanted to see if the technique could scale. The first step was to order a bunch of 25,000 stickers, because office supply was too short for my ambitions. I got all those packs for about 75 euros, VAT and shipping included, which amounts to 0.003 euros per sticker.

Then I searched for an appropriate image to render. I wanted something that made good use of the five basic colors I had (red, green, blue, yellow and black). I settled on an old image of Lucky Lucke, ready to draw his guns. It's easily recognizable (at least in France), has nice primary colors and is quite big and thin.

Using my JS tool, I made the template I needed, and computed that it would require just under 5,000 stickers and would be 1 meter wide and 1.6 meter high. Almost life-size. It's a big step forward from my previous creation, but it still felt manageable. I also prepared a "grid" at the correct scale to put under the transparent film, to help me place the stickers at their right positions. Since my roll of film is only 50 cm wide, I had to split the drawing in two.

And I started the sticking phase. All in all, it probably took me about ten hours to complete, and I was quite happy with the result. Here it is, hung on a door.

Lucky Luke on door

After that, I rolled it up and brought it to my workplace, and put it on a window for the whole world to see. Or at least for the whole parking lot. You can see that our windows are a bit small: the boots have been lost. And you can also see that I have a pretty bad camera...

Lucky Luke in situ

With the blinds closed, it looks ok. Without, the background looks black and the parts that should appear white (the hat and the hems of the trousers, the cigarette) don't look good, because I have no white stickers. A possible solution is to stick any kind of stickers on the other side of the transparent film: their back is white! I don't know yet if I will try to fix Lucky Luke or not. The solution with the blinds is working nicely and I don't want to waste more stickers. I'd rather keep them for my next opus...