Portrait Gallery

Very exciting project conclusion!  It started as a kind of "what the !@#$ am I going to put up in the kitchen?" and ended up being super epic.  So the talking portraits are such a huge awesome part of the Hogwarts castle--and one of the aspects I was highly impressed by at the ride in Orlando that they were able to recreate.  And I wanted to do something with them in recreating my own Hogwarts.  So I started to pull pictures off the internet--portraits and group portraits that were realistic looking and that maybe looked like they could suddenly start talking.  I also grabbed a bunch of realistic looking images of wood frames.  Then I overlaid the frames onto the paintings, grouped them, and saved the whole thing as a new image.

The next step was to send them all to my local Office Max print center; I just have to say how incredibly nice they were--answering questions back and forth via email about pricing and making sure every step of the way that everything was being printed exactly how I wanted and at the price they had quoted.  Anyway, I had them print out about 30 of these portraits on 11x17 paper at ~$1.18 a page.  I figured this was worth it for several reasons. 1) That much high quality ink would set me back at least 2 ink cartridges, 2) my printer doesn't print 11x17, so I couldn't get them as big as I'd like.  3) If my computer messed up on 1 of them--wasting quite a bit of ink.  And the results were incredible--seriously high quality.  A tip if ever anyone tries this--make sure to save your jpegs in a high resolution (you can change it with a button as you're saving the image).

I just finished cutting them all out with a paper cutter and will be putting them up on the walls and figuring out if I need any more after work:)

**UPDATE**
Put up all that would reasonably fit up on two sides of a wall.  I have 7 left (not that I couldn't get more)--I'm not sure quite what to do with them yet.  I could fill out the one wall a bit more, or possibly do a partial fill of a different wall, or maybe use a few to fill out part of the wall in the Gryffindor common room.  May have to meditate on it a bit...