Giant Picture - tutorial!

I posted awhile an image that showed off the giant picture I made for my girls' room - finally, the tutorial is here!  It was so cheap - around $13 (that's $8 for the print, and another $5 worth of an $11 foam board because you won't need to use the whole board....)

First, I saw on IAmMommaHearMeRoar that you could make big prints at office stores (Office Max, Office Depot) for cheap - just ask for the "Engineer's Print".  Awesome.  The only downside is it is in black-and-white, but I liked that, so it wasn't a problem.  

So anyways, I made the girls go outside before school so I could get a good snapshot of them in natural light - then I used photoshop to turn it black and white.  Then stick that image on a jump drive data stick thingy.

Now off to gather supplies - - first up, foam board for the picture.  Where do you get one that big??  Home Depot/Lowes - yep, it's the big foam pieces used to insulate houses.  And it's cheap - $11 for the whole board and you can get a couple of pictures out of it.

Then head off to the office store and ask for "the biggest engineer's print you can make" and hand over your jump drive.  It is 4 feet by 3 feet, which didn't seem that big til I hung it in their room and BAM, it's gigantic, but I'm okay with it.  Anyways, it was about $8.  They warned me that it wouldn't be photo-quality - - but hey, for $8, it was good enough for me!

UPDATE - I snapped a quick picture of the picture so you can see the quality -- up close it's not dead-on crisp, but who's looking that close anyways.  And it's not pixely at all...this is the bangs of the daughter on th right...

Go home and place your photo on your foam board  then cut off any extra...

 Now, here's where things went horribly wrong and I stopped taking pictures. Let me give you some advice:

--you can't spraypaint stryofoam!  -- I guess this is pretty common knowlegde, but no one told me.  It eats away at the foam.  So I had to use the other half of my board - good thing it was so big.  Instead of spraypaint, just use craft paint to paint the edges black.  And FYI, there's a clear film, like seran wrap, over the foam - peel it off so the paint will work.

--don't use mod podge for flimsy paper! -- I had planned to use spray glue, but had lent it out and figured I'd just mod podge the board and set the picture on - bad idea.  The mod podge was way to wet and cause the paper to wrinkle.  Plus then when I tried to smooth it out it wrinkled more and more.  Quite the disaster on their faces.  So I had to throw that picture away.  And trek back to make another copy (I'm sure they thought I was crazy)

So, lesson learned, I used craft paint on the edges and spray glue to stick it down.  I sprayed the whole board then had someone help me - one of us on each end of the big picture - slowly lower the picture onto the tacky board.  Then press it into place.

That's it!  To hang it, we used duct tape to hold loops of wire and hooked those over nails - super high-tech, only not :) Update - a view of the back for those who asked about it:

 Here's the view looking into their room - I love it, and so do they!!

So go make one!!  you can do this!!  (FYI, Here's the post about the stenciled dresser)

UPDATE: it's been several months and the picture is still looking great, not fading, etc - I'll try to keep you posted as time goes on, so right now, so far so good - you can see a more recent picture of it on this Butterfly Bedroom Wall Post.