The mechanichal/electronic side of the equation

[Brunhidden]

hello one and all of the art section, i do not mean to be an attention seeking troll of any sort but im kind of wondering what my options are

the setup is this- i have paper, pencils, and have been practicing hitting one with the other for a while now. but lack a way to share and get feedback on for my long-term plans.

the goal is this- i want to somehow convert my carbon based images to something i can show people online, but have no scanner. my attempts to fold the drawings into the disk drive have met only with bad sounds and small amounts of fire.


thus, what are my options? is there somewhere i can go to affordable scan my images? is there an inexpensive way to acquire something to convert paper to data? (asside from slapping down 300 for another scanner, ive got rent and a crippling addiction to Faberge eggs). of any options out there, do any of them allow me to scan items larger then standard office paper, because my daughters quite often draw some pretty impressive (no im not being generic father here, some of it is mind blowing from a 3 year old) artwork pieces that i want to preserve other then buying a fridge the size of a garage (although one of those would be awesome anyways). my education into manipulating an image after the computer ate it will wait for a later date.

help me out people, and once i do get this setup ill give free requests of questionable quality to anyone who contributed a useful post (ego boosting, slapping buttheads, being funny, and topic are all considered useful) to show my gratitude

[Mao]

They're not really all that expensive:

http://shop.usa.canon.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10051_10051_253908_-1

This is essentially the one I have.  I understand that money is tight, but it is something you could easily save up for here and there at that price I imagine.

[littlekreen]

If the images are larger than A4 then you'd probably either want to try staples and see if their printer/copier is a multifunction scanner. Libraries may have such a thing but many are not funded enough to afford one. Alternately what you'd probably want is a hand scanner as the paper may be arbitrarily large and not square depending on what the tyke wanted to draw on. The quick and dirty method may be with a camera and photo stitching software. (you'd probably want a tripod though)

[Brunhidden]

buying a scanner is the obvious but likely not soon achievable option- technically i have one, an old one which will not work with my current tower pc and would requrie dismantling three older towers to construct a frankenstein computer to run on xp for it to work... if i got a new one, id probably have to get it to work on my laptop and im not sure how that would work. also, even if its a hundred bucks thats a hundred i could use to pay rent, buy gas, and other poor people concerns of a family of four living on one income (thankfully a temporary problem, but id like to get started in less then three months)

ill be looking into the library, but work also has a scanner/copier/fax and i would be baffled but thinking its possible to scan, but instead of copying or faxing to put it on a flash drive... i would assume it could do that but have no idea if its a good idea to try

[Merlin]

ill be looking into the library, but work also has a scanner/copier/fax and i would be baffled but thinking its possible to scan, but instead of copying or faxing to put it on a flash drive... i would assume it could do that but have no idea if its a good idea to try

I'd definitely check the library, but if there's one at work, you could check if it can email scanned images. That's what the one at my work does, which is handy (but kind of a pain to set up, those things are way too hard to use )

Alternately, it's probably a long shot but if you live in Australia then send me a private message, because I've got a spare A4 scanner that I wouldn't mind posting locally.


Also addressing some other points in your first post, you can get bigger scanners but they're more expensive, and the only other way I can think to get things on the computer is taking photos, which doesn't usually work so well. But you can scan larger images in pieces on a smaller scanner and frankenstein them back together.