The Drawing Machine

I am pretty much besides myself with joy! This is definitely what I had in mind when I was thinking about mark making.

Recap, with these brush pens I can inject a small amount of ink into the reservoir just above the brush. There isn't enough ink to cover the whole page so it needs topping up.

I rewrote the code to add pauses every 100 brush strokes or so, the machine waits for me to remove the brush pen, top it up with some ink, and then set it away again.

What if, I thought, I keep changing the colour of the ink, and this is the end result!

As usual the code I've written fills the page — ultimately that's what I wanted, tally after tally after tally, one-by-one — but, I think I liked how it looked when it was about 80-90% done, a little bit of whitespace here and there.

It reminds me of the old game "Horace Goes Skiing" - trees are randomly placed onto a white snow background, and the player has to ski back and forth avoiding them. The randomness is such that the main ski area is less dense than the edges.

I think I could create a zig-zag line (not much of a zig-zag, but more than just a straight line) about ⅔rds of the way over, running from the top to the bottom. Then have the distance from that line + some randomness decide if a stroke gets drawn or not.

It looks like a whole bunch of trees, especially when there are some missing, so why not lean into it?

The downside of all this is I'm supposed to be making postcard and A5 sizes plots for the Patreon, and I'm not sure scaling down the lines will have the same effect; it looks good large, but will it look as good small?

After the previous mark making brush code I wanted to go bigger. I wanted to see how many brushstrokes I could make before the ink ran out, or dried up. Making the tiny marks is fine, but I had this feeling that I wanted to fill a large sheet in marks just to see what happened.

I didn't do that right away, I just scaled up the circle code as a first pass at seeing how many marks I could make.

The first thing was to just draw the marks in a sequence around each circle, which I already knew I didn't really want; experience had already shown that the first few brushstrokes are always much darker, and the brush starts to dry out at around 40-60 strokes.

A tweak to the code and I had it randomising the lines, which lead to a far more satisfying second plot, where the different tones and saturation of the ink mixed in with each other worked much better. If the first handful of strokes were always going to be darker than the rest, may as well have the mixed in.

The circles still weren't quite what I wanted to do, which was fill up a page. Back to the original tally code and LOTS of smaller tally marks on a sheet. I think around 1,404 of them in total on an A3 sheet.

In this case, while some lines are denser than others the whole thing didn't actually run out of ink. Noted: smaller marks, even though there are more of them = not running out of ink as quickly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!