It finished, 5 days total, looks awesome. Now I need to figure out what to do with such a big canvas, I don’t have a wall big enough for it at home.
With this successful test behind, I pause for a bit until the place becomes busier in the fall. I’ll try various experiments then.
3 Days of uninterrupted work, it probably needs 2 more. Things have been going well so far, I’m starting to believe it’ll finish without a hitch. I’m swapping pens strategically so they don’t run out.
The cool software I used for this one yields cool artifacts when it renders.
Some of the mechanical imprecisions of the machine come out on such a plastering of strokes, it’s got a good presence in a room nonetheless.
That one took several attempts and finally completed after ~40 hours. I wrote a way to have the plotter resume after power off to enable very long plots. The enormous deployment I’m working on will require it.
I’ve done a few other portraits over the Winter. Of my kids of course 🙂 They’re great subjects and I like to see them try to guess who’s on a nascent drawing.
Alas, the Sun is nowhere to be seen these days so I didn’t yet see it projected on the blinds.
Edit: finally got some Sun
I’ve been playing with sharpies on transparent paper. I’d like to make some sort of layered color deconstructible portrait with a sheet for each color overlapping each other. I failed today because of an alignment issue, but I stuck the black layer on a window. It’s very discreet and barely visible in the room, and once you notice it’s enough to see who’s on the portrait. I thought the kids might notice and would get a kick out of it.
Later the sun hit our faces so we lowered the window blind, and it hit me what this whole transparency thing was going to be all about. The reverse projection really makes it pop out. With color layers it’ll be amazing. I like the idea of something that’s barely there most of the time and pops out only with a particular alignment of the Sun.
Robin built a very cool Lego Mindstorms based plotter. I’ve seen him run into issues similar to what I ran into, and solve them. I’ll sometimes attach a monetary prize to some of his Mindstorms projects. Once he’s scratched the itch and wants to move on, but I know a lot of challenges occur not just making a robot work, but making it work well.
For a while there was $5 on making a drawing machine that drew something beyond a basic shape, it didn’t have to be much, just had to be something that proved the machine’s worth. And he’s earned it with this:
He didn’t write the software that turns text into lines, but there were plenty of mechanical challenges to getting the machine consistent enough to make this. Overall I’m blown away by the quality of today’s Mindstorms. Seeing him build his machine reminded me I had this set growing up:
Might have planted some seeds.
In the meantime I’m testing a 10′ deployment, a drawing machine so big one needs a ladder to get to the top. I haven’t ran it yet, but I know there will be new issues arising from the scale. Even just setting the paper is challenging.
I took the gondola plotter to work, where I can deploy it in places of variable public visibility. I have many social experiments lined up for it, but it’s sometimes hard to find the right formula to get people drawn to it. One thing I noticed, is that as people walk by, if the plotter isn’t moving, they won’t even notice it. But if it catches their eyes while drawing, then they get close and start pondering what’s going on.
And so the most engaging thing I’ve been able to come up with so far, is to simply have the plotter draw complex drawings over a day.
The Girl with the Pearl Earing
Then it’s really fun to sit nearby and watch people get close and observe the drawing, listen to their comments. I think it’s safe to say at worst it stops people and get them wondering what’s going on, at best it blows their minds.
Nat Geo’s Afghan Girl
This one went on the tabletop plotter too
I experimented with Esther’s drawing, trying various size.
And some multicolor scratching paper
I like to see people wonder what’s going on, I call it triggering brain sparks. I can say, between the gondola plotter and Esther seeing her drawing replayed on a different medium, that brain sparks were most definitely achieved.
For reference, the algorithm I used for the portraits is: https://github.com/serycjon/vpype-flow-imager, it’s one of my favorites.
I built a website for running experiments in collaborative drawing. It’s pretty neat and I’m not going to describe it just yet, but in the process of testing it, I threw at it all kinds of plots I had at the tip of my fingers, and it yielded some pretty cool results.
I may have here my next plotting streak: microplots. Some look predictably bad as they were meant as stress tests, but some came out well enough to make me curious.
More to come on all this soon…