Background gallery now available

Thanks to a great suggestion by one of our intrepid forum hounds (http://www.rubberslug.com/board/showthread.asp?T=568), we now have a shared background gallery. It's a little simple right now but I'll be working on it in the next week or so to polish it up a bit.

What's a shared background gallery? It's a place for Rubberslug members to upload high-resolution scans of their personal watercolor backgrounds for other collectors to use in framing and display. Downloads are available to any random passerby to this site. This may change in the future if the bandwidth crunch becomes too much, but for now it's open season.

Upload backgrounds here:
http://www.rubberslug.com/member/mod_sharebg.aspx

Browse background gallery here:
http://www.rubberslug.com/resource/mod_sharebg.aspx

Perks of contributing to this gallery include having a link back to your site for every background you upload, some bonus karma, and a warm fuzzy feeling. (Only the warm, fuzzy feeling has been implemented as of 10pm cst but the rest is coming before the end of the night.)

Hope this becomes a great community asset. Thanks again for the suggestion.

If there are anyother that you think someone might want just let me know. I have just started buying background and hava a few not so great ones I had to buy because they were paired with my favorite ones

Didn't expect anyone to upload so soon, thanks. =)

One minor issue though... the shared backgrounds are primarily for printing at high resolution either at a print shop like Kinko's or on a home ink jet. Do you have any larger scans of these backgrounds available? I know there's no edit feature for things you've already upload and I apologize. I'll add it soon.

If you want to know what I mean by "large scans", click on some of the ones I uploaded. You'll notice that they're over 1500 pixels wide in each direction and several hundred kilobytes in size. If you had scans about that size, that would be really cool.

By the end of the weekend, I'll make up a quick tutorial about working with print. The quick explanation is that a file that would look really large on your computer monitor would be normal sized printed at 200 dpi.

I also need to add the dimensions of the large image in the scan and minimum recommended printing size. Thanks again for the early contribution though.

I will rescan them what size is perferred. I do have a good scanner and can size to what ever is perferred.

If you can scan at 200dpi, that should be plenty good for printing. Dots-per-inch (dpi) and screen pixels aren't exactly the same thing, but for our purposes they're basically the same.

If you have a 15"x11" image, your uploaded image scanned at 200dpi will be 3000x2200 (15x200 by 11*200) pixels. On my scans, I cropped out some white space to make the files smaller. Save as JPG and try getting the file under 700k.

I'll try to write a guide to scanner, uploading, downloading, and printing this weekend. I know this isn't the most intuitive thing in the world but I do appreciate the contributions.

Heck, *I'm* looking forward to this more than anyone else because I want to download some backgrounds. =)