After a fairly hectic week of trying to nail down a decent pen mounting solution that makes setting all their z offsets the same, and having all pen tips well aligned. And then fighting tooth and nail with orca slicer to make it do my bidding for pen plots, the first torture test came out looking pretty darn decent! The pen holder is also lightly spring loaded so i shouldn't obliterate nibs *too* quickly.

This setup allows me to easily choose what pen width I want, to quickly and accurately do infills in all sorts of patterns, to have stroke lines in different pens, to quickly scale work to what paper i'm using and lots more.

Here i've used stabilos (black & brown) and some alcohol markers (the other 3 colours)

The fine old Sir Patrick Stewart! Finally managed to plot it in two halves, with a refill in the middle. After like two days of failures, I finally finished a plot successfully! My love for plotting is restored, lol.

A3, plotted with a 0.5mm rotring isograph, on 300gsm card stock. DrawingbotV3 Streamlines Superformula.

So, while Picard was plotting, I was busy working on this. user u/aware_dragonfly_5919 posted an amazing hand drawn maze over in r/mazes here: My maze 3 : r/mazes and it looked awesome, so I wondered if I could do something similar.... and here it is!

The first image is the actual plot, so you can see the size compared to an A3 sheet. The second image is a crop, with the start and end points highlighted ( start at green, see you at red ). The third is a png export of it if anyone wants to download it and do the actual maze, like with a pen or something.

The woven style is really cool, and although I didn't get it quite right, I think it came out pretty good!

Flow field on scratch paper, 18 x 26 cm.

Tip: try mounting the wooden stylus vertically. It *should* make less of that scary noise when it scrapes off the coating (see a small clip in the comments).

It's hard to photograph with the metallic gold ink (Gelly Roll), but I think this turned out well. This is a single line plot, on brown card stock, 100x150mm in size.

So after yesterdays debacle, I thought I'd go for something easy. Picard, looking swishy with drawingbotv3's Streamline Superformula PFM, plotted with a rOtring 0.5 isograph on white 300gsm card. It *was* going great until I ran out of ink... Started at 9am, manually stopped at 6pm... so, not a lot of time wasted or anything!

I swear, that pen's capacity is somehow huge when I test it, and gets magically smaller every time I run a plot with it!

I do kind of like the effect though, it looks like something is swirling over him, but I think it could be done better. I need to break the image into two so I can plot one half, refill the pen, then do the other half. Of maybe figure out a bigger ink capacity for the pen.

B5 size. Pentel Energel pen.

Today is my birthday, and a friend of mine surprised me with a little piece of generative art, ready for my pen plotter.

61 curves, one for each year.

None is a perfect circle: they all share the same underlying structure, but each introduces subtle variations, like the growth rings of a tree.

Time accumulating, never quite repeating itself.

And there's a small discontinuity running through the composition. A reminder, perhaps, that it's always possible to change direction.

A rather unexpected birthday gift. 😊

God-damn, this was annoying! So, I started this plot this morning, it's now 9pm at night and it's just finished. First try, one of my 0.5mm technical pen nibs broke, like snapped off completely. Second try, about halfway through my pen lifting servo died and started dragging the pen. Third try... Pen ran out of ink halfway through. Eventually I simply ran out of things to go wrong and managed to plot it!

Four damn times I have plotted this today! Four! And now it's actually plotted.... I don't really like it. I swear, I am like an inch away from swearing off plotting forever!

Anyways, it's a maze, start top left, end bottom right, and be careful, I'm pretty sure it's cursed!

As I mentioned in previous posts I fell backwards down 2 metres of concrete steps on June 2 and gave myself a medium concussion. Not recommended at aged 61 I was cleaning up my plotting area and found these 4 that I made. No idea when or how the hell I made them. I do know the telephone one was the night before I got injured. The other 3 I must have done while in the “ wtf is going on phase “ I don’t remember June correctly at all. I apologize if I said or commented anything around the June 2- August 15 ish. This has been absolutely terrible. Thanks for the well,wishes btw.

omg, it actually worked! I love truchet tiled images, I really like the way they flow, but the lines are always so short, they look like a plate of jumbled spaghetti. So, I added some truchet tiles to my maze generator, and it works! It generates a super long flow that kinda looks like one bunch of spaghetti draped over a whole bowl of it.

This is going to be such a fun project to play with! I'm super excited by these early successes, now on to the hard part of designing 45 truchet tiles so I can do a decent one!

Hi guys,

I'm struggling with getting shapes to be recognised properly in DBV3, some shapes are recognised and hatch filled, whilst others aren't. I've checked the SVG in illustrator and everything seems to be identical between the working shapes and non-working shapes - and I don't seem to have any line breaks, all shapes are the same colour for fill and stroke is set to none.

Is there anything I'm missing, or do I just learn inkscape instead, i'm using a klipper based plotter so my options are a bit limited for software compared to an axidraw or GRBL based plotter.

Thanks so much for any help, awesome community, I'd love it if you aren't all so secretive about how you're generating your lines though 😂

I went back to plot some editions from my first NFT on fxhash. I didn't know how to perform line occlusion back then so I used a half-tone effect to create layers. I can't believe how much has changed in the world of generative art in 4 short years.

I just steam-lined my process and am so excited! I created a website to design these and a cli (calibrated to my plotter) to plot them. So I just design it on the site with the tools I've created, copy the shareable url into a cli command it and my machine plots it 😂 . I'm still tweaking things but I'm super happy with it.

If there is interest I'll work on making updates so people can calibrate the cli to their machines, save that info the site and be able to plot their own designs.

drawplot.com

Feedback and feature requests are welcome. I will be working on the site in my free time.

Created in a stiff mounted (no springs) custom tuned bambu a1 mini.

Took 7 hours to print on a bambu a1 mini fully converted to custom gcode operations with a stiff mounted pen

Well, I actually made two. One that has a small 5 tile set and uses rotation which I used for the first tro truchet-style images, and a more complete 15 tile generator which I used for the last two images. So now I can do truchet style mazes and also more decorative ones!

I'm very proud of my pipes, I really like it, I think it's my favourite! :)

Inktober is so much fun, I'm trying out all sorts of new ideas!

B5 sized plot, using Ecoline Red ink, and 1mm Staedtler Marsmatic stylographic pen. This is a one continuous line plot - the varying shades come from the same line overlapping itself.

Incidentally - this image is processed through Foxglove

Some months are a lesson on how creativity ebbs and flows. In the midst of transitioning to new software and workflow, I had hit a wall this month. The work I was producing felt flat and uninspired. To combat that I went digging through the archives, pulling files from years ago. It helped me realize that there were many avenues I left unexplored and they remain there waiting to be discovered.

The first print was from a file from my very first Patreon set, over 6 years ago. It was one of the first times I let go of precision to let the media lean into its unpredictability. The shape in the second print I've played around with for years, I go back to it because it has always invoked a feeling of comfort and safety within me. The third print was from when I was really into dots, I love working with them and the halftones they produce but this print made me remember how incredibly long they take to plot. The last print was a quick exercise inspired by wood type printing about creating solids and layering.

Studio assistant in last pic, because nobody works alone.

12x12 in. white 120lb paper

unipin 0.1 & 0.5, stabilo 88, paper mate flare m, pilot v razor point

this piece explores order, disorder, & overlays