Scanography: Directing the Glass

About this prompt pack

This pack shows you how to build scanography from the glass up: what stays sharp, what disappears with lift, what transmits light, and what distorts when the scan head moves. The 8 prompts move from a two-object contact study to portraiture, physical typography, and a layered night-swim still life, so the controls transfer to editorial art, posters, and campaign images.

What you'll learn

• Contact plane — The glass is the focus plane. Sharp metal, pressed petals, and a few millimeters of falloff make contact visible before any advanced effect enters the frame.
• Transmitted color — Thin subjects let the scan light pass through them. Overlap becomes a physical color mix, while wet rings and lifted rind keep the image from reading like clean vector art.
• Time in one pass — A scan is recorded line by line. Moving one object once, while fixed objects stay crisp, turns the distortion into a clock instead of a generic glitch.
• Pressure portrait — Skin makes the contact map readable at a glance. Compression, condensation, and rapid falloff separate a scan portrait from a face photographed above glass.
• Height as falloff — The upright spring turns scanner depth into a measurable ramp. The flat blue square proves that softness comes from height, not a lens effect applied across the image.
• Material response — Absorption, transmission, and reflection need separate instructions. Naming each response keeps velvet, organza, and metal from collapsing into the same generic shiny surface.
• Type on glass — Type stays crisp because the ink plane stays on the glass. The lifted corners carry the physical effect without sacrificing the headline.
• Composite the physics — The final image assigns a different scanner behavior to each object, then keeps the composition quiet enough that all six behaviors remain legible.