The Drawing Machine

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.

Quickly plotting some last minute Halloween cards. I can ask Kitty (the AI) to write a bunch of cards on a 4x4, 5x5, 2x4 and various other combination grids, by either giving her the exact text to write, or a prompt she can write variations on.

Realised I did't have a project for general drawing machine stuff, better fix that.

Now that I've finally started to record the drawing machine "tutorial" videos the machine is going to be doing a lot more pen plotting, so I have footage and examples of what I'm talking about.

However, these are do I can have some little cards to go in with the Ghost riso prints I'm going to send off to people.