This bit from the article made me laugh ruefully though: "it's as simple as buying some black paper and a white gel pen." You can get some beautiful effects with white ink on black paper but it is notoriously difficult to get looking good. White ink is tricky stuff. But that's part of the fun!

After rewatching that, I did a one-shot remake in p5js: https://g.co/gemini/share/b983a93e3ae2

Is there actual plotter simulation software I could be using?

Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?

I feel like I get asked a lot the same questions and I think this article describes it best. Like yes I could have just upgraded to a nicer printer, but there is something fun about the process of getting an artwork plotted that makes it fun for me.

I need to upload some of my plots to share.

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On a similar note for others who want to get into this, there was a thread awhile back on "What is the 90% activity in your favorite hobby", for example sanding taking 90% of the time for woodworking. For pen plotting the 90-95% is the art side. Taking images, converting them into g-code either via SVG or other processes, or writing code to make generative art, that is the 90%.

At the end of the day the pen plotting itself at the surface level is a projection of the effort taken to generate the art. Where it gets really exciting is the capabilities and unique aspect of the medium (like touching on white ink or watercolor) that create truly unique ways of presenting the art.

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Some related subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlotterArt/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PenPlotters/

I remember using flatbed plotters with a "static-cling" button. (maybe HP?)

you clicked the button out, put paper on the flatbed, then clicked the button in and a static charge sucked the paper down and held it in place.

You would generate your plots using a language that could select various color pens, move to x1,y1, pen down, move to x2,y2, pen up, etc...

I think better printers and then inkjets are what finally killed them off.

Plotters are usually limited in how they can tilt the pen, and their force-feedback capabilities are quite primitive, if present. And if you’ve ever tried sharpening a compressed charcoal pencil to a fine point, you’ll know how difficult that would be to automate.

If I ever happen to find four spare years tucked away somewhere, I might just attempt to build such a system myself :/

Edit: to get an idea of what is possible with this technique, see the work of Annie Murphy Robinson [1], who also hosts workshops.

[1] https://anniemurphyrobinson.com/

Also got a friend to hack away a chunk of the plastic casing with a circular saw so I could use pen adapters for modern Sharpie and Stabilo markers, which are much easier and cheaper to acquire than old format plotter pens.

They were also huge for architectural drawings.

Everything he says here is true, but to me at the end of the day after running some of my work off on very high end inkjets and dyesubs. It's just not the same. There is an inherent, and i'm not sure how to fully communicate this, physicality to a plotted artwork. Slight imperfections in ink flow, the way fountain ink behaves when lines cross, the way the ink bleeds into the medium you are plotting on, the inks (or other mediums) you can choose vs what you can put through an inkjet. It's like comparing an oil painting to even a high quality print of that oil painting. You lose texture going to inkjet.

This is kinda no longer true. Computer tools such as “krita” (open source) do an exceptional job emulating paints and brushes. A lot of professional illustrations now days are done digitally and printed. “Art” less so but the tablets keep getting better.

https://krita.org/en/

As someone who was kinda adept at making black and white prints from negatives, I kind of miss some of the old tech (making prints was a little magical). But digital / ink jet can get you 90% of the darkroom much easier and has some serious advantages.

I do applaud the effort and the fun factor here is real. Those pen plotters are neat and enough different to make this an interesting niche.

Having an existing 3d printer is a bit “draw the rest of the owl” for this, but being able to extend and modify a device like a pen plotter is pretty nice.

There's a world of cheaper unbranded Chinese plotters that folks are using that seem to work well. Quality does matter, you want something very precise and stable.

https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/171

And a 2d minimalist plotter.

https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846

They seem to have been bought. Those pro plotters look nice though quite pricy. The page still has good resources.

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/

https://note.com/penplotter/n/n4fdf6959738a

The page is in Japanese, but you can get a feel of things through the embedded videos. One of them links to this instructables page in English:

https://www.instructables.com/Mini-Plotter-V2/

I'd also be very interested in a 'good' cheapish plotter - to try a few things that I was never able to with the extra low quality one that I bought

Doesn't seem so 'legacy' to me.

Or are you referring to other printing methods, say for example silk screening? There, you would definitely select a specific ink to use. It just depends on what your goals are.

Anyway, yes, professional printing can go beyond just CMYK in various ways.

Looking at the artwork on my wall, there’s two big things that set prints apart from an original artwork. 1. Computer software doesn’t capture the imperfection of a physical medium. 2. Printers can’t reproduce the texture of layered colors.