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!
Also an interesting instrument that i've played with. Japanese refillable brush pens. You can get a really fine line out of them if you position them just right and great flow. One of the toolheads I built for my custom plotter uses a stepper instead of a hobby servo for pen lift (originally just so i didn't have to hear those little gears grind and for reliability) and i've been working on code so that I can vary the 'z' over the course of a line for use with brushpens.
White is tough, and I've never found a white ink that doesn't just fuck up a fountain pen... sakura gelly rolls are really the best that i've used, and even they can be testy.
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?
It’s very accessible these days to have a finished piece of art that’s all yours - even with little artistic ability.
Great portfolio of art btw, thanks for sharing!
Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?
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.
ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably want something more modular and larger anyway, but the Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.
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.
I've used my axidraw to plot on floors and walls in the past.
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:
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.
But if the paper can't be assumed to be white, CMY need to be opaque, otherwise yellow on black paper would just look black. Then you can no longer create red, green and blue. So you need additional red, green and blue pigment, likewise opaque. So "CMYRGBKW". Then the other colors can be mixed via dithering the eight base colors as usual.
Or maybe your printer still needs white paper, and the white pigment has some other use?
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.
I have Epson EcoTank, which is great since I can refill it from the ink bottles (even non-Epson), but since it gets only occasional use for color printing, almost every time I have to clean nozzles before printing in color.
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:
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.
Interestingly, this technology is not lost, and it is in a current vinyl cutter/plotter, the Silhouette Curio 2:
https://www.silhouetteamerica.com/curio-2
But this is quite a new model and I don't remember seeing this technology anywhere else for a long while, so perhaps they had to wait for some patent to expire?
These machines also have swappable tools (effectively a two tool changer).
I think ultimately the plotter largely became the vinyl cutter.
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.
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.
Beware that this is harder on the servo lifting the pen, so you may want to order a few extra of those (also at TaoBao/AliExpress). I've switched from the cheap SG90 servos that are often used to the only slightly more expensive MG90S with all metal gears that seem to do better.
I’ll probably have to make the holder myself but good to know others have had the same problem!
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.
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.
