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

Rename / Migration

I think I’m gonna migrate this from onionandgarlic.com to jasonrparadis.xyz since I’d like to document some of my tech projects like my pen plotter scripts, programming stuff as well as food / gardening.

What the heck is a Kohlrabi?

A few years ago I was on a big gardening kick and came across kohlrabi. It’s some sort of cabbage / mustard relative that’s normally harvested when it’s young. I decided to let them keep growing (I had no idea what to do with them), and they ended up with some looking like really weird aliens.

Kohlrabi. I think you normally harvest it a bit before this.
same date as above (timestamp says 8/9/2014)
Some of the kohlrabi above left in the ground for waaaay too long. (11/25/2014, almost 4 months after the above)
a grotesque monstrosity (11/25/2014)

I never actually tried eating them but I’ve seen them occasionally at Winco – when I do, they are usually about the size of a small apple – ones like these are too woody to be edible, I think. I’ll have to find a recipe and pick some up next time. They are definitely going in my next garden, if only as a weird decoration.

an overgrown kohlrabi with all the leaves taken off (2013)
early winter overgrown kohlrabi

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Categorized as gardening

A relevant meme

I found this in the depths of the internet and it made me laugh.

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Categorized as nonsense

Timelapses of Future Bread

I’ve been making a lot of bread and dough lately, and I like photography, so I decided to setup a webcam to watch it grow. I use python scripts to grab webcam images, turn them into gifs, then turn those into videos. I’m still working on what quality and setup works best, so it’s not the best quality yet, but I think I’ll keep making more.