Oil Pastels Machine

Okay, back at it today, and a few more passes, and I kinda love it.

The colours really pop in the photos and it just looks like a wonderful thing to have going on in a drawing machine.

Another part of me is worried about all that dust near the machine though, so 🤷‍♂️

Okay, I cleaned up all the dust and kinda ruined it, lol!

It looked so much better before when it was all broken bits of pastel and shit. And now it looks muddy and brown.

There's undoubtably a way to fix the previous versions, crumbs and all. But I don't think I want to deal with anything that complicated.

I may come back to this, but for the moment I'm going to switch back to what I'm supposed to be doing (rubber stamps and pens).

Perhaps I'll return to this again in the future.

These soft pastels are both worse and better than the other ones. It's kinda hard to tell if it's going to be a win or not.

I know they need more than one pass, and what I have so far looks pretty, but I feel that's maybe just the crumbly dust. Gotta let it keep on going, but for today I've run out of time, the rest will have to wait until next week.

Wait! I may not be done with pastels just yet, I'm down in London and saw these. Should I get 'em?

Okay, I have to confess the pastels didn't work that well, although they weren't as bad as I expected they were going to be.

Here I'm trying oil crayons instead. Now, I've avoided crayons as they seem, well, childish, but these are proper arty crayons, so that's okay!

It wasn't actually that bad, but once again, it wasn't that great either. But to tell the truth I didn't throw very much thinking behind the code or the design, it was very much minimal effort just to see if it was worth carrying on.

Definitely worth the try, and perhaps I'll come back to it at some point in the future. For the moment though I think I'm going to park it here.

Now hear me out, what if, instead of rubber stamps, or pens, we put oil pastels into the ArtFrame drawing machine?

This is something I've always wanted to do but the normal drawing machines (AxiDraws) don't have enough downwards pressure to really make pastels work.

But the ArtFrame works on GCODE, where I can attempt to move whatever it's holding down through the surface plane that holds the paper. I mean it won't go through the surface because there's an amount of give in the carriage head, but that's more downwards pressure than we've had before.

So, armed with flow fields once again, this time capturing the colours from a photos, I threw some pastels in there and give it a go.

It's certainly not as good as I'd want it. But it's not as bad either, which I'll count as a sort of win.