The Drawing Machine

Dev Diary

Monday 9th March, 2026

Doing a little more with the mark making brush work. One of them in two colours yellow-ish & purple, and then a second one making the brush lower down more for wider marks.

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Friday 6th March, 2026

As we still won't have gotten to actual code for the DM101 videos, we're still in the introduction stage, I have to create some extra pen plots this month for Patreon peeps.

I'm going to be doing some variation on tally marks, in this case small strokes with the drawing machine, adjusting the height as it goes; basically setting the z-height of the start and end points differently.

Getting some interesting effects and this pretty cool circular patterns.

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I particularly like this one, which happened because the plot before this had the brush height set wrong, so it scrunched the brush down into the paper splaying the bristles a bit.

So with this next plot, instead of having one neat brush tip there's a slightly different effect.

Next step is figuring out how to make it repeatable.

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Wednesday 11th February, 2026

VERY NEARLY FINALLY!!

The Pen & Paper Drawing Machines 101 video is almost done, will be so pleased to get this one behind me and onto the next ones.

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Thursday 15th January, 2026

I got the rest of the asemic writing plotted to send off to the Patreon supporters. The postcards are (mainly) done in Pilot iroshizuku ama-rio ink, and the A5 plots are using Troublemaker's Simoun ink mixed with Van Dieman's Night - Shooting Star.

Because the Patreon postcards and artworks are supposed to be artefacts from making the tutorial videos, but the so far the tutorials are only the introduction there aren't any, instead I'm picking a topic each month to explore. It's interesting to not have long to take something from idea to production. But then I have to move on to the next thing pretty quickly, so I'm slowly building up interesting project that I'm going to have to go back and revisit.

You know, once all the tutorials are done.

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Monday 12th January, 2026

Grabbed some new brush pens and had a go at some asemic writing for the Patreon supporters. I really love this kind of thing and want to come back to it at some point.

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Thursday 8th January, 2026

Finished the brush postcards for #ptpx2025, and stamped the back of them, just going to let it all dry before moving onto the next part.

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Wednesday 7th January, 2026

Ooooooooh!!! I used fancy ink in the brush pens, and oh my goodness is it amazing, these looks so good. I had to break out the macro lens.

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Tuesday 6th January, 2026

More experiments with the brush, really loving how the ink goes down.

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Monday 5th January, 2026

First pass at the #ptpx2025 postcards with the brushes, I think it worked out pretty good!

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Thursday 1st January, 2026

Got myself a whole bunch of brush pens, should be fun.

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Tuesday 30th December, 2025

Quick tests for next months' Patreon "rewards". I fancy doing something with brush work, and needed to work out what the correct z-heights are, so I created some lines that start at one height and end at another, so I can see what the height range is I want to use.

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Tuesday 16th December, 2025

These are the two final dot designs for the A5 artworks I'm sending out to my Patreon supporters. A nice example of shading in black and white.

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Wednesday 10th December, 2025

Started cutting up the "dither" POSCA cards so I can send them out to the #ptpx25 crew.

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Drew a sort of diagram of the 12 dots used in the dither pattern, these 12 dots are turning into the motif for this bit of the project.

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Wanted to show off the whole dither patter by feeding a gradient into the code and getting a nice demonstration of how we add and remove dots from the pattern to build up shading.

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Monday 8th December, 2025

Got some Molotow empty pens, that I can fill with ink/paint. They're much like the POSCA pens but I can now see how much ink/paint is in each one, and cheaper to!

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Plotted some postcards for the Patreon supporters, worked perfectly.

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Friday 5th December, 2025

Went back to using the POSCA pens to make another FALLiNGWATER print, so I can compare it with the rubber stamp version. I think the rubber stamp version works better at a distance, and the POSCA pen looks great close up.

But it's possible the rubber stamp version just suffers a little from the darker colours, I should try this again with lighter stamp colours.

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Monday 1st December, 2025

Got Kitty to draw my calendars for me. Or rather cleaned up the code to make it a lot easier to output them. I had to jump through some hoops before to get one created, and the extra friction meant I didn't do it as much as I wanted.

Decided to revamp it so now I can just ask Kitty for a calendar plot and she gives me one. Makes it a lot easier for planning and the like.

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