Wall-size reproduction of a photograph

Eat Out editor Heather Shouse and her husband, artist Anders Nilsen, had a similar idea of creating a wall-size reproduction of a photograph Nilsen took in the Wisconsin woods. As a wedding gift to the couple, their photographer friend Todd Baxter took it upon himself to make the mural happen. After blowing up the image on Photoshop, Baxter divided it into three sections to span the length of the dining-room wall; he made sure to repeat a few inches of the image at the edge of the pages so they would seamlessly overlap when pasted on the wall. Then he printed a high-resolution version on his home printer on three sheets of 44-inch-wide Premium Luster Photo Paper ($235 for a 100-foot roll at epson.com), which he handed over to Nilsen to finish the job. After coating the wall surface with primer ($9 and up at Ace Hardware, 725 S State St, 312-461-0900) and adhering paste ($4 and up at Ace Hardware) to the paper, Nilsen aligned the sheets side by side. If you don’t have your own oversize printer, head to Kinko’s (1800 W North Ave, 773-395-4639) where you can pay $12 per square-foot to print on a roll of 60-inch-wide photo paper. A few free websites will help you break up your photos into a manageable size, so you can cobble them back together after printing (which is particularly helpful if you’re not using a roll of paper). For instance, upload your image onto Blockposter.com and the site will walk you through the process of slicing up your picture into blocks (the size of each block depends on the eventual size you seek for the entire image); you can then download the image as a printable PDF file. A similar site, Rasterbator.com, also creates a multi-page PDF file from your uploaded images, but this one produces a Lichtenstein-style look by transforming the image into a sea of dots. Lastly, if you simply don’t have the patience or the technology at home to make your own file, a few sites out there will do it for you. Send a photo file to FotoStick.com and the company will send back a self-adhesive, single-sheet mural. Prices range from $5 for an 8" x 10" print to $90 for an 84-inch-tall print. Looks as though you’ll always have Paris, after all.