We've all seen it in the magazines, patterns for certain parts of a project that tell you to print them out at 200% or so to give you the full size pattern.
Well that works well for most small items but what happens when you need to print a full size pattern for something larger than a standard 8 1/2 x 11" piece of printer paper? You need to split the pattern into sections that will fit the paper then reassemble the pages to give you the pattern.
This is how I go about doing this. Some may know some short cuts and if so please add them to this.
I start by determining the size of the piece as its printed in the magazine. You may have to "square it off" by drawing some lines just to measure to, as I did with this leg to a tilt top table. See the faint pencil lines around the leg in the first Pic. Also see where I recorded the measurements.
Now we can measure the picture and knowing we need to increase its size by 200% we simply multiply this measurement by two (2) to get the correct/actual size. Now its off to the scanner.
Scan the page and save the file as a .jpeg. Open this file with your editing software, in my case Im using Paint Shop Pro 8. Its easier for me to use than Corel or photoshop and its also cheaper!
Once you have the file loaded in you need to resize it to the final dimensions. On other words the actual size of the part. In the case of this leg the measured size as it appeared in the magazine was 4 9/16" wide by 6 1/8" tall. So the actual size of the part is 200% of that or doubled to 9 1/8" wide and 12 1/4" tall. Too large to print out with a standard printer right?
Begin by cropping the picture using your pencil lines as a guide, try to set the cropping properties to exactly line up with your pencil lines. Crop the picture then resize it to the FINISHED dimension. 9 1/8" x 12 1/4". See 2nd picture.
At this point I also white out everything I dont need in the picture just to lessen confusion. Just use your airbrush tool set to white and paint out the places you dont want.
Using your software determine the middle of the part. Paint Shop Pro or PSP from hereafter gives me a total size in pixels. So its easy to divide the picture in half both ways, length and height. For this leg the pixel size was 950 wide by 1320 tall.
Cropping again.
We need to determine how many splits we need to make in order for each part of the picture to fit on a standard page. In this case we only need to split it in half giving us two equal printouts.
This is where it can get tricky. We know that the actual size is 9 1/8" x 12 1/4". Since we can rotate the picture and fit the 9 1/8" on a page then we need to split the height in half. Using your crop tool make a square on the picture and resize the cropping properties so you are making exactly a half crop. PSP lets me set exact crop properties so they would be left 0, right 950, top 0, and bottom 660, half the height for the top part. Bottom crop properties are left 0, right 950, top is now set to 660 and bottom is set to 1320. See picture 4 (crops not to scale in this picture but should be of equal size both width and height, I just did these two quickly for the tutorial) Crop the top then without saving print that picture out. Go back and undo the crop and set the bottom crop. Crop that then print it out as well. Now you have two pictures printed, the top and the bottom. Picture 4 again.
Continued....
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