Made on a converted Ender-3

A new pattern I love, 20h of plotting with 4 different passes

Black ink on 250 gsm Fabriano paper. A3 size.

Hi everyone,

Here is my latest series of brush plots. Pure black acrylic on white Yupo paper. Yupo paper is a synthetic paper. Using a synthetic paper is nice as it's possible to put a LOT of paint. As such, it creates a nice texturing effect. This is heavily inspired by Pierre Soulages work.

The most difficult part of this whole series was actually to capture great photos. It's been really challenging.

I hope you like them!

Cheers

TL;DR: Last week I shared GD Studio, a Mac app for designing generative line art. This week GD Studio got photo import: drop in a picture and convert it into continuous pen strokes and single pen-taps, in seven styles. Reposting for anyone who missed the first thread.

What's new: photo import

Add an Image layer, drop in a photo (from a file or your Photos library), and pick a conversion style. GD Studio reads the picture's light and dark and rebuilds it from continuous pen strokes and single pen-taps — never a flat ink fill — so the preview matches exactly what the pen draws. Brightness and Contrast sliders shape how the subject reads. Seven styles are available: Stipple, Halftone, Hatch, Contour, Outline, Sketch, and Squiggle.

Everything stays real strokes, so an imported photo layers, masks, scales, and plots exactly like the generative patterns — and you can mix the two in one piece.

In case you missed it: GD Studio

A few months ago I picked up AxiDraw compatible pen plotter and wanted a single macOS app where sliders and settings directly influence the final drawing. So I built GD Studio. With it you can:

• Create generative pattern layers (with a shuffle button for quick ideas)
• Add text layers, and now import photos as an Image layer
• Import existing plottable SVGs into a layer
• Adjust stroke, dash patterns, render styles (wobble, dotted, nested outlines), masks, scale, rotation, and positioning per layer

It exports as SVG or PDF, or sends directly to Plotter Hub over its API — with options to optimize the SVG, fine-tune plotter speeds, and pause between layers.

Plotter Hub

I didn't want my Mac tethered to the plotter for the whole job, so I built Plotter Hub, a plot server that runs on a Raspberry Pi (a Zero 2 W or 3B+ is plenty). Upload an SVG over WiFi, then start / pause / resume and monitor the plot from any device, with optional vpype optimization and physical pause-button support for pen changes between layers. It's free and open source and can be used without GD Studio.

• GD Studio (macOS, paid + free trial): https://www.synendo.com/gdstudio
• Plotter Hub (free, open source): https://www.synendo.com/plotterhub

i built a little axidraw style plotter simulator that runs in the browser. it's open source on github. just drop in a svg and it will plot it for you, no wasted ink or paper!

GitHub: https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/VirtualPlotter/tree/master

Demo: https://killedbyapixel.github.io/VirtualPlotter/

seriously though, would you ever use this for anything? what other features would you like to see added? i'm thinking about modeling real pens next including limited ink levels, failures, paper types, and other parameters that would be fun to mess with.

Simple perlin noise

Just recently set up this machine, trying to figure out why it seems to start some of them in the wrong location and then veer back on to the correct path.

I have tried reducing speed to 10%, increasing the pen up/down delays to 700ms. Reduced acceleration etc. I think the belts seem bass-string level of tight but I don't have a great point of reference. When I slow it all down, I see the pen move to the same incorrect starting position, pause, then go down, then start moving and tracing along the same path.

I am using the 03 size XWT Micro line Pen from amazon, and some thick mixed media paper.

Does anyone have ideas for what could be the issue?

EDIT: RESOLVED
U/truax suggested I make sure the frame was square. It wasn’t. I loosened the screws to re-adjust it and now it’s plotting nicely!

Hey all! Early last month I had the opportunity to bring my plotter to an art fair and plot live. The overall theme of the fair was "place" and my work was part of the programming In Care of Unfinished Places, which featured local artists doing their thing at Mana Contemporary.

How I tapped into place was through home by asking people what's something specific that reminds them of home. What I love about pen plotting and generative art is that no two pieces are the same. Why this is extra special, to me at least, is that everyone's responses are unique; adding another layer into the mix. I cannot make something like this without people. It's their human responses filtered through various algorithms/software and ultimately brought to life by a machine holding a pen. I may be rambling now but it's a process that I find so beautiful.

Back on track, people sent in their responses through text, pictures, voice memos, or by leaving a voicemail. The core of the work relies on waveforms. For voice memos and voicemails, it's easy enough to extrapolate that. For text responses, I fed them through a text-to-speech bot to get waveforms. All waveforms I fed through waveformer (a tool by misha.studio, huge shoutout) to get SVG files of the waveforms. For images, they were passed through drawingbotv3.

Why waveforms? I really just wanted a way to get lines. The waveforms are unique to each person and give me a set of lines I can work with. Lines are then either filtered out based off size, offset, lofted, rotated around a point, spread across a 2D field randomly, turned into circles based off their length, rotated around a central point in 3D where noise is then added, etc.

The plot consists of 34 pens and 20 interpretations of what home means to people; deconstructed, abstracted, juxtaposed. It took just under two hours to plot and is on 11"x14" white 120lb paper. Pens used include gelly roll, muji, paper mate, stabilo, staedtler, and uniball.

This is hopefully just the start of an ongoing series in collaboration with itsdense. If you found this interesting and would like to participate, call 551-220-2368 to leave a voicemail or text something specific that feels like home to you.

For possible future pieces, I'd love to explore different abstract forms of representation or lean into one or two from the piece above and see what the output can be.

Last pic of the bunch are business cards I made using scraps and drafts :)

Building on the style and reusable elements of my procedural botanical generator (Plotanical!), I’ve built out the bones of a procedural planet generator.

It reuses the same basic light aware shading system, but this time with some procedural stars, and various landmasses on a spherical object.

Cheap Amazon rollerball on heavy grain A4 - my go-to!

Some recent output on my ArtFrame. All are 22" x 15" on paper done with various microns and stabilo fineliners. Output is from 3d scans and various STLs run through a python script in blender.