The Drawing Machine

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

Plotted some postcards for the Patreon supporters, worked perfectly.

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.

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.

Started playing with an ordered dithering algorithm, to convert images into shaded dithered dots.

It's a bit like halftone, but with halftone you adjust the size of the dots, but because I'm using POSCA pens, where each dot is the same size, I have to use dithering instead.

I'm taking the original image and splitting it into channels (CYMK, or RGBK) and saving each channel as a greyscale image, which then gets dithered.

The Fibonacci thing was good, but I think picking the colours randomly doesn't give the best result when you move further away from the middle of the pattern. I tweaked the code to be semi-random, in that it cycles through the colour, but occasionally it skips a colour which gives us more of a coherent pattern even as we move out from the middle.

After experimenting with the POSCA pens and the envelope code, I've had a go at writing code specifically for dealing with the pens, rather than kinda hacked stamper-to-pens code.

I took the Fibonacci sequence and had a go at making some colourful plots out of it. Worked pretty well.

I think they look better smaller than larger, after a certain size it all gets a bit too random.

Started recording the Pen Plotter Tutorial videos, this was the setup today.