Painting with a pen plotter

I realized that painting with the axidraw API and scanning SVG files was actually pretty easy, so I’ve been trying to rewrite some of my old plotter scripts to work with painting. It works okay for pointillism and long strokes, but short strokes don’t turn out well or just get painted over by the next lines.

The pen drawings near the bottom are mostly for testing https://github.com/jrparadis/plotplot which is a web interface for the axidraw CLI I wrote because I dislike using Inkscape or CLI for basic things like disabling motors.

A lot of these are bit op patterns layered and transformed multiple times. I think I’ve got a bit more experimentation to do – the only one that’s actually new and not adapted from old pen plotting scripts is #4, which is an abstract version of Louis Wain’s Early Irish-Indian Cat xy scanned for closest colors and plotted about 10 times (it’s not suppose to be very accurate, just the basis for something abstract). The current script only seems to get results from really colorful pictures though. Guess I need to keep on trying!

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Categorized as art, tech

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