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…
I plotted a bunch of UV snowflakes. I keep giving them away so I needed to rebuild my stock.
I hand them out to kids with a super cheap UV LED. They love it and then they shine the light everywhere else searching for reflective surfaces. It’s much like playing with a magnet where you try to discover where it will stick.
Hey psssst, kid, you want some snowflakes? I got some sheep too.
I’ve been after this one a long time with many failed and “meh” attempts. Once again tooling adequacy is only recent.
And seeing all the attempts, Robin tried his hand at it 🙂
This is close to the upper limit for plot complexity. The squiggles are packed so tight the ink and the fine point pen laying it are at the limit of what they can do while keeping the strokes distinct.
Having lived alongside machines my whole life, I never fully understood until this project what they were capable of. I knew it, but I didn’t understand it fully. I could I never draw this well, I wouldn’t have the dexterity to make these strokes, I wouldn’t have the ability to draw as fast, as relentlessly, or as flawlessly. Lastly, for the 17 hours that the plotter was drawing away, I was free to do other things. I know it’s not much of an epiphany but I found myself starring at this ongoing plot quite a bit pondering about how overwhelmingly better this machine was at drawing than I could ever hope to be. It’s one thing when a machine does something completely foreign that just isn’t possible for us humans, it’s another much more relatable thing when it holds a pen and draws. Learning about stepper motors has been a small revolution in my mind, and I see them everywhere in the world now.
I think I’ve pushed this one machine as far as it can go while still producing something of value. It’s a really good feeling to have pushed it this far given it represents the culmination of a 3 year pursuit. Now I can focus even more on the funner aspects of plotting cool things, knowing the machine and software stack can tackle the maximum level of complexity I would throw at them.
Reference: Ivan Murit’s Texturing
I’ve attempted this one many times and only recently had proficient enough tools to bring it to fruition.
I found a super fun Hex Map generator, this just had to be plotted even though the SVGs it makes aren’t super plotter friendly.
Little by little I’m increasing the complexity of what I can send to the plotter. As an image passes through the various programs I choose for a particular render, I push their limits and often run into bugs, memory limits and others. As much as possible, I dockerize each step so they are easier to summon and improve on their own. This also allows for pipelining.
I finally found a fast and reliable SVG->GCode converter. Inkscape’s is reliable but it’s extremely slow. I had to rewrite a part of it to be iterative rather than recursive so it could handle the size of the SVGs I am throwing at it.
Inkscape itself has a command line mode so some of the repetitive stuff I use it for are dockerized, for example to ungroup objects and break apart compound paths. It’s truly amazing.
I kind of want to publish all this but I have no idea if I violated any licenses frankensteining code from various sources. And I have much better things to do with my time than to find out. Things such as this wonderful plot:
I’m going through a big plotting batch, including a lot of creations from Mandalagaba. It’s very lucky to have this stream of material to pick from.
Most of the work here from Hava Edelstein, 1 From Lara Laubert and a couple of unknowns.
Fountain pen
I cobbled together a program to cross-hatch colors into various densities based on luminance.
I also finally have a fast SVG to GCode converter, I’ve been after this holy grail for years but always reverted to the super slow yet reliable Inkscape converter. I rewrote a fast one I found which crashed on large SVGs (the whole reason to get a fast one in the first place). It works like a charm after turning certain recursive calls iterative.
This one breaks my brain in the best way possible. It is soothed by the immediate pattern recognition, yet the patterns beak upon further inspection.
From PlottyBot’s preview window
Lara Laubert, another prolific Mandalagaba user, her representations of Nature leave no jaw undropped.
Esther at different “resolutions”, rendered with Ivan Murit’s Texturing
Robin & Esther, the lines created pen motions conducive to ink goop
Nicole Texturing’d I need better lit pictures of my subjects.
I got a CMYK pen to experiment with multi color renders, particularly ones where the colors can mix into the full spectrum.
And so…
Nicole CMYK, the result is cool but I definitely want to improve. On a wall it’s a bit spooky, it captured her essence perfectly but it dissolves into chaos as you get closer.
Interpolated Random Grid courtesy of llemarie @ turtletoy.net
Bricks courtesy of markknol @ turtletoy.net
The Great Seal of Vermont, courtesy of Vermont
Appalachian Autumn courtesy of base12 @ turtletoy.net
I was looking for blue ink, I pretty much had to get this “the last color of the king”. A nod to the 1789 scholarly experiment to check if noble blood was in fact blue. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t. I love Noodler’s Ink, I came looking for UV ink and stayed for the jokes (and the quality). Gee I wonder what color billionaire blood is.
The fountain pen is loaded with it now, I’ll be playing with handwriting in the near future.
I was never an artist, at all, but I have really enjoyed how my pursuit of perfection with the plotter, mechanically, electronically and programmatically has ended up making me care deeply about ink quality, flow, and paper properties. It reminds me of all the times artists explained their art medium and I was completely oblivious to it. I never understood that the medium was relevant, yet today it defines the boundaries for what I can do. It’s the possibility space. Much of the artistry of pen plotting comes from the various algorithms, processes, programs, one manages to get running and combine. It’s as much a skill as learning how to draw, it takes effort and skill. Only a borderline unhealthy obsession with seeing a machine wield a pen drove me develop one for years, yet today I’m happy the journey took me from the automaton to exploring more artful things. I’ve been bathing in computing for as long as I can remember, it’s nice to look outside a little. And in the end, it’s computing that took me there. How’s that for a stream of consciousness?
Raytraced Sphere (reinder @ turtletoy)
Digital render
Analog render
Close up. The imperfections of ink flow is 80% of what makes pen plots appealing
Curl noise (reinder @ turtletoy), playing with a color changing pen.
When I don’t know what to plot, I can always browse through the hundreds of cool mandalas people draw on Mandalagaba every day. By happenstance, my life is set up such that a steady stream of plotting material is pointed at me.
Hava, by far the most advanced user of Mandalagaba, never hesitates to mix tessellations, radial symmetry and then fine tune the parameters of each resulting cell.
Simple mirror symmetry is often used to draw fauna.
It works really well, I need to think about what cool doors this opens up.
