Rasterbations

For those who don't know (and especially those who ventured here intriged by the title), the Rasterbator is a website that will take any picture and convert it into a rasterized image of essentially any size. What this actually means is that it is a great source of huge, inexpensive (free, for those of us with free campus printing), impressive posters for college kids.

This website came to my attention in early 2004, and since then I have made one for every place I have lived. I think it's pretty clear by the similarities between them that I have an unhealthy obsession with my drumline. It happens.

Badger Badger Badger

It was the end of freshman year, and we had to get the loft out of our dorm. That meant a few weeks of bunked beds and a very cramped Markley dorm. Anyone who's ever lived in Markley knows what I'm talking about. It also meant that there was a ton of empty wall space formerly covered by the lofts. Our room looked baren and boring, and I'll be damned if our formerly sweet room was going to suck for the end of the semester. Armed with the power of the Rasterbator, it was time to select the perfect image. Various images from Family Guy and my personal photo collection were rejected in favor of the best Internet fad of the time, the badgers:

Using the dorm computer lab (which did NOT have free printing), I then created the final product. It consisted of 50 sheets of paper, and at the time we all thought that was a lot. Enlisting the help of friends, the dream became a reality:

Our dorm room was once again the envy of every college freshman in the area. Mission Accomplished.

2003 Glassmen Snareline

Upon the completion of the semester, I moved out of the dorms and back into my parents' house. I decided it was time for something big. Before the end of the semester, I acquired wall dimensions from my mother and set off to create somethign much greater than my badgers - a mural spanning floor-to-ceiling and completely covering a corner of my room. Not only was it going to be bigger, but I was going to take advantages of the CAEN computer labs on North Campus, whose printers not only were free for my unlimited use, but also had the ability to print nearly edge-to-edge, reducing the unsightly white lines between sheets to something more subtle and arguably more artistic.

All that remained for this ambitious project was to select an appropriately dazzling image. Because this was my parents' house, I wouldn't be giving up the room to someone else at the end of the term, so the mural was likely to be, for all intents and purposes, permanent. The image needed to be something that was both awesome and timeless. In the end, the choice was simple:

Taken from the almost-famous set of shots from our semifinals warmup, this shot was perfect. It was the best picture from the "dock sessions" that showed the whole line from the front. Yes, Ballgame is looking down and yes, he is the biggest one in the picture, but I think it lends a humanizing quality to the whole thing...

I began work as soon as I got home. Here's an in-progress shot:

And finally, the finished product. 90 pages in all, almost twice the number as the badger mural.

Here is the picture I sent to the Rasterbator Gallery. You might notice that it doesn't go all the way to the floor like I said it would. Well I decided it would be better to cut it off at that point. Besides, the drumset covers that part up.

G-Snares 2004

A sort of tradition started with the first rasterbation of the Glassmen snareline. After the first one turned out so well, I knew that I had to continue with it. Shortly after getting off tour in 2004 (and moving into my new house on campus), I found the perfect picture of the 2004 snareline. This was taken by my mother, on finals night, in the final set of the show:

This picture is, in my opinion, just about the most badass picture of any snareline, ever. And it made for a pretty badass rasterbation:

Even though it used a now-smallish 54 sheets, it remains my favorite. It still coverd a whole wall of my room though, because my room was ridiculously small.

Glassmen 2005

For my third year of college, I ended up procrastinating a bit on the mural. This was unfortunate because my room in my new apartment was huge, with equally huge walls to cover. Partly because I couldn't find a shot of the snareline as inspiring as the previous year's and partly because I found some really cool shots of the whole drumline, I decided to go for a change. Unfortunately as I write this, drumhard.com is down so I can't retrieve the source image I used for my newest rasterbation.

It took me about a week to finish this mammoth of a rasterbation:

The final mural was composed of a whopping 130 sheets!

I think it's pretty clear that like how I spend my summers. You can expect more of what you see here in the future...

Coming Soon!

• Rasterbation tips
• My favorite rasterbations by other people

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