photography headboard

French Kiss
Pin up a paper headboard


In our last issue we ran a headboard project for woodworking wizards. For those too ham-fisted to screw together two planks, here’s an easy alternative. Made from paper and pushpins, this stand-in requires only a computer, a printer, a wall, and an image you can sleep under every night. Any old postcard or snapshot of you and your sweetie will do (there’s a Photoshop filter that will pixelate the image for you, or you can use the Rasterbator online application as suggested in the tip below). We scanned a classic from a book of vintage movie posters—Jean-Paul Belmondo smooching Jean Seberg in Breathless—then used a graphics program to blow it up to just under queen-size, and printed it out “tiled” on multiple pages (drawing a grid on the image and blowing up each segment one by one at the copy shop works just as well). It may not be the most comfortable headboard ever, but it takes the prize for most inspiring.



Select an image and scan it at the highest resolution possible. We scanned ours at 1200 dpi.

Measure your bed, and either Rasterbate the image online (see tips, below), or use a graphics program to create a new document the size of your desired headboard. (Ours is slightly narrower than the width of a queen bed.)

Import the image, and scale it to the size of your document by dragging the corner while holding down the shift key. You may have to crop the image, depending on how it fits into your document size.

Go to the Print window and click Set Up, then go to Tiling and scroll down to Tile Imageable Areas. Make sure your media size is set to 8 1/2” x 11”. In the Print Preview box, a grid will
appear over your image that shows how many pieces of paper will be printed out. Click Done.

To view the original image with a grid overlay, go to View and scroll down to Show Page Tiling. A grid with numbered rectangles will appear over the image. You can use this as a reference map as you pin up your pages.

Take a screen grab of this image and print it out on 8 1/2” x 11” paper. (To do a screen grab on a Mac, press Shift+Command+4 and draw a marquee around the image.)

Go back to your original headboard document and click Print. As the pages come out of your printer, number the back of each one according to the map.

Once all the pages are printed, trim off the white margins using an X-acto knife and a straightedge ruler on a self-healing cutting mat.

Begin pinning up the pages on the wall. You can use a low-tack masking tape to get all the pages up on the wall and aligned before you tack down the corners.

Center your bed under your new paper headboard, then dream up all the other pretty pictures you’re going to pin up when you tire of this one.


If you’re scanning an image from a book, be sure to set your preferences to Grayscale. That will net you a printout with clean edges and won’t hog your color ink. And don’t limit yourself to bright whites. Black-and-white pictures look sharp on colored paper, too.

from readymade.com.