Making Music Larger Than Life

I’m in the final preparation mode for our Composition Workshop, so I thought I’d do a quick how-to post about the large scale map that I made yesterday.

Rather than printing out a single page map, I wanted something that would really POP when the students entered the room. With the help of a free map-making website and the often-ignored Paint program that comes standard on any PC, I was able to make a 844 x 246 px image into a 4.5 x 3.5 ft map.

The trickiest part was taping all the pieces together!

PianoLandia!

How to Create a Multi-Page Print Out: (PC Tutorial)

1. Create a map with the Map Creator — add any land features that you’d like. Here’s what my map looked like when I was done:
2. Open the image in Paint and select Print –> Page Setup (Vista or 7) or File –> Page Setup (XP). Here’s a screen shot of what this looks like on XP (click to enlarge):
   
3. Under the Page Setup, select how many sheets of paper you would like. I chose 5 x 5, but you can choose anything you’d like. Remember — you will lose resolution on smaller images. My map ended up being a bit pixelated, but I didn’t mind.
4. Close the Page Setup. Now you’re ready to print! Select the printer that you’d like, and be sure to print “All” pages.
5. To assemble the map, I used a paper cutter to trim the RIGHT and BOTTOM corners off of all the pages — EXCEPT for the pages that were on the right side and on the bottom of the map. (If that sounds confusing, lay out your map first and you’ll see what I mean… I wanted to have a border ALL the way around my map.)
6. Keep the pages IN ORDER while you trim them. You’ll thank yourself later. Finish assembling by taping up the edges, either on the front OR back.

I hope you found this small tutorial helpful! You can use it for all sorts of things. Last year I used this technique to print out our Summer Cruise map so that the students could track their journey to different countries in Latin and South America. You can see it in the image below — it’s propped up on the white board on the left.

What kind of workshops or camps are you teaching this year?

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