A printer will usually leave a dot pattern to reproduce shapes, with a resolution fine enough that everything will be sharply defined.

The blackness of a laser printer is a bit less qualitative than ink, because it's shinier from a large variety of viewing angles.

Here if you zoom it a bit, you can see a very slight wobble in the pen tracks because it catches a bit of the paper's grain, and depositing ink, the paper "drinks" the ink which fattens the lines a tiny bit.

This is more noticeable on the drawings with a lot of pen lifts/drops, where both the lift and the drop leave a dot a bit larger than the line between them.

The one with gradients made with lines closer and closer is especially eye-catching to me because all of those imperfections adding to produce this "worn-out" look in the darkest parts of the gradients.

Some paths overlap a bit and if you look very closely there are more than one nuance of black because of this - in some other places, the lift/drop are close enough that a bit of ink seems to travel by capillarity between the lift and the drop, resulting in two touching lines that were separated in the program..

The ones having a lot of circles show other imperfections, with a bit of ovalization in the circles, and the paths generated to fill the circles with black missing a few parts..

What I like a lot is that the result shows all of those little details that accumulate and produce this imperfect look, without needing to simulate it in Photoshop or another software if you were to print it with a regular printer.

Plotters can make big art [0] cheaper than large-format printers, can be higher precision [1], and produce much purer colours (except pure C, M, Y, or K on a printer, but most colours are not those). The results also look qualitatively different up close, and are to me somehow more appealing.

Printers are more versatile within their limitations, so for many types of art they are better, but for what plotters are good at, to me they are clearly better.

[0] Or woodworking templates, blueprints, or whatever.

[1] E.g. a straight line is produced by continuous movement between the two points, with no pixelation or quantisation.

One upside to a plotter is you can work with different media, both in terms of materials (e.g. chalk or paint) but also what you are plotting on to. For example, you can put certain types of marker in and draw directly on to glass or ceramic tile which might have some interest in terms of making gifts.

It's a fair question! I've thought about that a lot, as someone who has plotted maybe ~200 pieces of their own work (and generated plots for ~500-ish).

In person, it is very obvious that you're looking at something created by a physical pen. The lines have a glossiness to them, a slight pressure, etc. It's an artifact a printer couldn't have created.

Process-wise, it's a fun challenge too, but that's a different thing altogether.

I have an AxiDraw Mini that I use with a sharpie to label thinks like zippered storage bags, because I am OCD that way. The only reason I'd use a plotter over a printer is if printing on heavy card stock that won't feed through a printer, or if using something like a metallic ink pen for effects you simply can't get with a CMYK ink set.

Plotters are fun, it's like a creative collaboration with a robot and you can hand it any pen you want.

Concept of Pen plotters is more useful in 2D manufacturing and things like laser cutters.

That's really helpful and I've thought about doing this because I don't have a dedicated space for my axidraw and it's kind of a hassle to move around (I have the XL)

I use it for art a bit, for creating really nice notebooks for organization. If you're into these things, I'll also say that the Cricut (a cutting / craft tool) also does pen plotting and while it's a much smaller space (max 12" wide, possibly infinitely long) it can be purchased for much cheaper and is a bit more versatile.

Figured out why, it loads ~80MB worth of images.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-adamfuhrer-com-pen-...

For me it just took a long while to load but eventually the content shows up

Same, is there some kind of compression proxy we can put the site through?

Can reproduce too

Really appreciate it! Unfortunately I don't at the moment. Big fan of RSS as well so I get the sentiment

I'm impressed that it works in an Axidraw. It probably helps that many of the strokes were very short so the Orenz Nero reset itself each time the pencil was lifted. I wonder how the Axidraw maintains optimal pressure with a pencil where the lead wears down enough that the pencil needs to get closer to the paper (which is how the lead holder retract works in the Orenz Nero).

Check out the coding train on youtube.

The tip of the Winsor & Newton fineliners are quite hard actually and work pretty well. Although the tip does wear out after repeated use (before the pen runs out of ink), so might not be the most ideal pen for the job. Also, the servo I use with the AxiDraw is the default one it comes with and doesn't apply any added pressure on the page.

Thank you!

People have attatched pens to 3d printers and done this!

It has a head designed for fitting writing instruments. I expected some kind of adjustable pressure mechanism, but I'm not seeing it in pictures or in the description. The closest I found was

    The pen holder fits a wide variety of pens, including Sharpie fine and ultra-fine point markers, most rollerball and fountain pens, small-bodied whiteboard markers, and so forth. It can even hold a fountain pen at a proper angle of 45° to the paper. You can also use implements that aren't pens, such as pencils, chalk, charcoal, brushes, and many others. However, you'll get the best results with instruments such as fountain pens and rollerball pens, which do not require the user to apply pressure. 

at [0].

[0] https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/890#

It should be no different, both use stepper motors and gcode for movement.

As someone who bought a ~$150 knockoff plotter, I wouldn't recommend them unless you're unsure and just dipping your toe into the hobby. The plot quality will suffer -- even small amounts of backlash or slop in the mechanism and pen carriage will result in irritating and unfixable offsets in finer detailed plots. The bigger issue is actually software support -- all the hobbyists shell out for the Axidraw, so it's the only well-supported unit on both an art-software-workflow side and plotter-driver-software side.

It's pretty crazy if it's just to generate some pictures for fun, especially when there are alternatives. I have an A3 flatbed Graphtec plotter with a precision of 0.01mm [1] that I got for something like NZD$40 (>20 years old, but perfect condition).

[1] Not a typo, but I don't have a way to check it. I use it in its "low accuracy" 0.025mm mode.

Yeah wait till they see what CNC machines cost!