Finished 'The Hobbit' Screensaver!!

Finally! I started this one about a year ago. Scanned dozens and dozens of the artwork pictures from this old book that was falling apart.

Had read it to my children when they were young and let them read it themselves when they were able to actually read. They loved the pictures and enjoyed reading the story to make sense of the pictures. So the book was well-loved, and therefore, well used up.

The first thing I had to do was put it back in order. Not all the pages had numbers so I had to guess on a couple of them. Then came the scanning.

If you have ever scanned a picture from a book or magazine, you know it doesn't come out perfectly square or balanced, and depending on size, has left-over edges showing. So the next project was to take each and every picture to the Paint Shop Pro and clean it up, re-size it and clarify and brighten the colors. In some cases, I didn't leave them as I found them. I pulled small ovals or rectangles out of the big page. In others, they were two pages across, so I had to erase and push and clone to get that big page seam out of the middle of the pic.

In making this particular screensaver I felt I couldn't take the easy way out and just make it a slide show. The pics had to be in order of the story, and have captions for those who wanted to be reminded of who was who, and what was happening. Because of the Lord of the Rings trilogy being fresh in everybodies minds, the Hobbit story might be somewhat fuzzy. And I had to do something with the smaller pics to make it more interesting to watch.

It ended up with 61 pics (13 MB) and that was after I cut many from the great stack of possibilities. Rankin and Bass, the artists, did an abundant amount of artwork for the book, as it was meant for children. So you might say there was more picture than words. (Want to know more about Rankin/Bass? Put their name in Google and take your pick...The choices are many)

And after all this work, it's FREE to all those interested. I didn't do the artwork, so I can't take the credit and sell the work. I'm hoping it will draw people to my site and tempt them to check out the other screensavers that ARE mine and for sale.

I'll put in some pics here, tomorrow, to show you a sample.