The next installment of Absurd Crafts with Lyleberr is here! Are you ready for it? If not, too bad because just like how I cant be bothered to stick with a set name for my recaps, I will keep moving along.
Today we are talking about Typewriter art.
In this crafting recap I will go over my Secret Santa gift to @genosha as their replacement santa. If you havent seen it, here is a link to the secret santa post and here is their photo of the project (I forgot to take my own final photo).
This writeup is mostly story and history, if you are bored by that then skim photos and jump to the end.
Process details:
Concept: Not terribly long ago a good friend gifted my family a typewriter they refurbished. This immediately got the old wheels spinning on how could I use this for my ideas that I hadn’t implemented yet. Ive always been a fan of Typography Art especially when I see it with things that are close to my interests but it is rare when I am able to find it where it is more than simply photoshopping an image over colors of font to make art prints. I wondered if I could use this typewriter to help bring a twist to the idea and this was the perfect time to try. Genosha is a Bulbasaur collector who hopefully will one-day collect a Snap Bulbasaur card but unfortunately it may not be in the cards soon, this is something that I could help with, I mean how interesting would it be to have something made on a machine thats almost 75yrs old?
History: Writing machines date back into the early 1700’s but the typewriter was not in its current form until 1868. Typography art has happened for many years but usually it is very niche and relatively unknown. There are several styles such as making only simple nondetailed characters similar to ascii art all the way to adding shading through stacking different letter strokes in the same line over and over again. The typewriter I used for this is a 1956 Royal Quiet Deluxe (travel version with case), the main reason this is important is because the font of the letters changes across years, also this thing weighs like 15-20lbs as opposed to 20-40lbs for non-portable versions. Also know my ink ribbon has no whiteout option.
How it works: If you have never used a typewriter, they seem foreign and daunting at first because things are both mechanical and technical. There is great variability if you know what you are doing and how it works but you are fairly confined to mechanical settings. First thing first, understanding how it works. A typewriter uses casted typebars (the letter on an arm) to strike through an inked ribbon and leave an imprint on a sheet of paper. The ribbon winds slightly for the next strike and the carriage of the typewriter (sliding mechanism that holds the paper) slides over 1 space. This means that there are spacial limits and with any mechanical parts, if something isnt aligned perfectly then the outcome will also not be perfect.
After becoming familiar with the mechanism of a typewriter, I tested all the keys, upper and lowercase fonts, tested how the strike looked, and tested the amount of keystrokes that a paper could handle. Some were less pronounced than ideal but with that being just how it physically is, there is no changing it. Since paper has to wind around the platen (the drum that the paper rolls around and is the backing that the keys strike against), there are limitations to top and bottom margins as well as side margin limitations.
I found that every keystroke moved the same amount regardless of letter or punctuation or space, and that the carriage return (the arm that you use to slide the carriage back over) would also adjust the paper a uniform amount everytime it was used. Remember how I said that there are mechanical limitations? A major one is that due to carriage size, paper must be less than 22cm wide (8.5inch). I learned in my tests that this means there is no option for landscape in the correct orientation.
Typewriter quirks:
- Notice how there is no 1 key? Just use a lowercase L.
- What about exclamation mark? The carriage only moves when spacebar is released or key strikes on its own, so you have to use a series of keys to get one, Hold Spacebar until the sequence is done, hold Shift, Make an apostrophe followed by a Period, release everything and ta-da !
- Mechanical parts get stuck or dont strike correctly. For this, every keystrike matters so they should be checked often.
- Ink ribbon may have a less saturated area. Its mechanical so the harder you press the harder it strikes and the more ink transferred, opposite is also true with a soft press you can barely get a keystrike.
- Carriage return is not 100% precise and the use of backspace or spacebar is needed to get to the exact position. Every line should be checked on the measurement bar to confirm position.
Image conversion: Ok now that I have the mechanical specifications understood, how will I convert a cards image into type?
Easy, its time for cheating. After some research I found that almost all apps that attempted to convert images into type were pulled from the app stores over time except for 1 that the programmer charged for, it is called “Typewriter FX”. After some questions to them if it would serve my needs, I bought the app and started testing it on images. It is a wonderfully interesting app that converts and image based on a grid and quantifies shading per square and replaces it with a similar letter, the details of the grid arent shared. You can adjust contrast to a point and adjust typewriter font but it had some drawbacks like I couldnt edit specific portions, do any image editing in the app, or export the creations, all in all it was what I needed with some work arounds.
Testing it out: Alright, now for the fun stuff. I first converted just the art to test it out. Turns out the app converts images but doesnt do all the thinking for you. At first I didnt realize landscape was going to be an issue to get in the correct orientation.
After only using it vertically I found that the app converted images to 86 keystrokes wide and 62 lines down, The typewriter at maximum setting could only do 91 keystrokes wide with no margins and 61 lines down with minimal margins. After trying to convert and eventually planning to leave out a few spaces to get an even margin look, things were going better.
Everything seemed fine but I was trying to do it solely digitally through my phone and quickly found out that I was not going to be able to remember exactly which line I was on, or which key, or the number of spaces between gaps. After I was 1/4 of the way through (about 2-3hrs) I missed 5 spaces across bulbasaurs head and this lead to having 5 keystrokes into its head and being off at the end of the line, thus ruining the picture.
To prevent this from happening again, I created a digital grid on the image and began crossing off sections as I went along. 2 more errors needing restarts later, I decided it was too much work to edit the guide photo every half line and I needed a more analog option. I also was not liking just having the art and decided to find a way to do the whole card.
Back to the app, but without photo editing software in it I had to be rather particular about how to get the contrasts correctly for the whole card because the rest of the card would wash out the cardart and size matching was an issue when trying to edit only specific parts of the image. I separated out the cardart in the same dimensions as the rest of the card details and converted them separately. I then printed them both on the same sheet of paper to get a final guide image. I then gridlined it every 5 keystrokes to keep track and would cross out each line as it was completed.
Around 10hrs of working on it later, and only 4-6 mistaken keystrokes (typewriters can doublestrike by mistake at times) but none in vital areas, I had a completed image for the gift. I was in a rush to send it asap so I forgot to take my own photo of it but this still works. Approximately 5,400 keystrokes for the final image, probably 10,000 after all testing.
And there you have it, as always I hope this helps someone somewhere maybe think outside the box with a craft. If anyone reading this wants to give it a go, it can be fun once its complete… provided you have a functional typewriter. If you want to cheat, buy the app and throw in any picture you want into it.
