Show HN: My Pen Plotting Journey(adamfuhrer.com) |
Show HN: My Pen Plotting Journey(adamfuhrer.com) |
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.
I think you're misattributing things. Plotters use stepper motors and so have a minimum distance they can move along each axis. Due to this, they don't produce perfect lines at an angle and do introduce similar artifacts to what you'd see on a screen.
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.
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 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.
This also helps so that I don't constantly have to worry about accidentally bumping the table and causing the drawing surface to move in relation to the potter or visa versa.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-adamfuhrer-com-pen-...
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}You wouldn't have an RSS feed by any chance? I'm trying to avoid social media but I'd love to continue reading about what you do.
Here's Lucia He - an artist working with plotters and watercolor
e.g. https://twitter.com/ZeeZee_ETH/status/1628435706275037186
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Struycken
[2] http://pstruycken.nl/EnDyn.html?D,tag=P&w
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carel_Struycken
I need to try p5.js some time. Any tips for where to start with that?
https://github.com/beardicus/awesome-plotters
in case you find this stuff as fun as i do.
When used by a plotter, by changing the Z depht it would be possible to have very interesting dynamic variations, wouldn't it?
I can see how easy it would be to break the tip too, so better buying a bunch of those.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/barbro-backstrom
My family has one of these on the wall (quite dusty - as it's from the 1970s :) ), and the 3D effect is great.
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].This design is simple to produce however it causes registration problems if you attempt a multi-pen (multicolor, say) plot, where the pens have different diameters. In the past when faced with this i've 'fattened-up' the narrower pen with tape wraps.
* I got my AxiDraw as an impulse buy for a Black Friday sale. They go on sale around then
* Search AliExpress for "AxiDraw". There are cheap clones for ~$130 shipped
* Thingiverse/etc have some DIY plotters in various form factors: Stationary like an AxiDraw, polargraph (hanging from two points vertically), little plotter vehicles that "feed" a paper through by rolling over it...
* Old 1970s/80s retail plotters (i.e. HP). These are sometimes more trouble than they're worth, both mechanically for repairs and software-wise. Serial port versions are more rare than HP-IB versions. The drawingbots Discord has good vintage info here
Plotters are really fun, and HPGL is easy to generate with code.
[1] Or get a thin client with a serial port (I have an HP t630) and put Linux on it and use it as a plot server.
Are you able to elaborate on what you were expecting or hoping for?
[1] Not a typo, but I don't have a way to check it. I use it in its "low accuracy" 0.025mm mode.
However there were a few issues - bit fiddly to construct (the same might be true of the axidraw i guess) and windows only. Found some software online to drive it on linux.
* Native XY resolution: 2032 steps per inch (80 steps per mm).
* Reproducibility (XY): Typically better than 0.005 inches (0.1 mm) at low speeds.
I've often thought Tibetian-style colored sand mandalas would be a fun way to use such devices.
Of course, you'd need a lego-sorter-style device to separate the sand into different colors afterward.
Well that nerd-sniped me. Maybe a very small vibratory feeder so you can handle individual sand particles? Would require the sand to be fairly homogenously sized, but that's nothing some sifting can't fix. One of those usb-microscopes for checking sand color perhaps? Then you get to the point where you want it going fast, which might be tricky...
To the degree that different colors of sand have different physical properties I wonder if it would be possible to use differences in vibration and/or electrostatic properties to sort as a whole rather than evaluating each grain.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/479163/what-kind...
Flatbed ones are like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/anachrocomputer/5183771083, https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/control-vintage-roland-pen-...
Large format ones are mostly used for vinyl cutting nowadays, but they look like something like this: https://www.signmaster.co.uk/hardware_item/graphtec-ce7000-s...
I guess I'm thinking larger than 17" and the two flatbed ones you linked would suffer from the same problem (except that the first probably has no way to do larger than its bed)