Pleasing the Artist with Serious Scanning

It simply starts with a great scan. You've heard it a thousand times before. When you're holding a 4x5 transparency and it needs to be a 30-foot image, the best thing to have around is a great scanner operator.

Piece of cake, says Nevada Color Litho. Ron Sirovotka, the company’s scanner operator, had in his hands a beautiful image of a desert scene that was to be blown up into a tremendous giclée art piece for Las Vegas' Clark County Credit Union. The project is one of 16 giclées, and is part of an ongoing effort to turn their particular banking experience into one of calm desert serenity.

The most impressive of these images is the one pictured here. Mark Andrews, a vice president at the bank as well as talented photographer, took a photograph of a Red Rock Canyon sunrise and wanted it turned into a 30-foot penta-tych panorama.

“The biggest hitch," said Wes Drysdale, Nevada Color Litho's president, "was taking a great image that an artist had created, and replicating it on canvas in such a way that the artist was pleased. This project really stretched our limitations in comparison to our customary work.”

To accomplish this, the original image was scanned on a Hell/lino drum scanner, and then sectioned into five pieces. These pieces were color corrected and sharpened in Photoshop.

Each piece was printed (using a Roland Hi-Fi JET) on canvas -- heavyweight 100 percent cotton, combined with a 310 gram acid-free watercolor paper. They were gallery wrapped (no frames) and mounted on the wall of the bank behind the tellers. "We cut some wood, drilled some holes, used lots of screws," Andrews said. “It was very scientific.”

"The biggest hitch," said Wes Drysdale, Nevada Color Litho's president, "was taking a great image that an artist had created, and replicating it on canvas in such a way that the artist was pleased. This project really stretched our limitations in comparison to our customary work."

Mark Andrews is pleased. That's why he continues to return to Nevada Color Litho, and why people still love gawking around his bank.