r/PlotterArt

First plot on my new Bantam Tools ArtFrame 2436. Used acrylic paint pens on 500GSM cold pressed 22x30 paper. It’s super fast!!

I like the monochromatic look of white on black paper but white ink pens can be notoriously inconsistent.

White Gelly Roll? Meh. Posca paint markers are good but thick.

Enter the Pilot Knock Gel Ink Extra Fine Juice Up 04. This is a piece I've already printed in posca acrylic and I was really happy to see the precision with this new pen.

Hi! I create pen plotter visualizations based on explosion simulations.

Here’s my workflow:

I write Python code to simulate explosions, modeling compressible gas dynamics.

I place advecting lines on top of the simulation so that each polyline naturally follows the fluid flow.

I then use the pyaxidraw module to draw the result with a pen plotter.

I’ve uploaded more detailed videos on Instagram, so feel free to check them out if you’re interested: (https://www.instagram.com/p/DXZBz77Eb6j/?igsh=ODlvOHM5emkwMjRn)

I’ve recently started using a Rotring Isograph, and I’m looking for inks that get darker where lines overlap. I’d love to emphasize line density more clearly. If anyone has recommendations for inks that behave this way, I’d really appreciate it. Any other advice or questions are also welcome!

Besides the brush tip (which is a bit unpredictable), this set also have a bullet tip. When I need to go over the same lines more than once, it always behaves the same, which is super helpful.

The barrel is quite thick, so it doesn't flex, and there is a small ridge where the cap clicks that sits nicely in the pen holder. Sounds like a small detail, but when you're using almost all 24 colors like in this piece, it actually makes things easier.

In the end I didn't need any registration marks or alignment tricks! I even did the second pass after changing all 20 pens, just to be sure everything was fully dry before going over it again.

The paint is the usual fluid acrylic, just a shake, no pumping needed.

Coded in Python.

The glass is a 2mm floating glass from a clip frame, framed with a black backing

After figuring out how to turn the 1986 BBC Micro game The Sentinel into plottable SVGs, and making an animation (posted last week) I realised I could play with the camera code to give me a couple of offset left/right views. So now I have a little production line going of two machines, one drawing the right/blue side first, the second drawing the left/green.

1. First plot
2. More plots (Stabilo point 88, red/cyan)
3. Drawing the second layer
4. Drawing the first layer (obviously this happens first!)
5. McFronty & Penjamin busy at work
6. "Backslide" being lazy in the back, because I've run out of things for it to do
7. The overloaded UI doing 3d previews so I can set the composition
8. An earlier test version with Uni-Ball pens (too fine)

Just ordered a box of cardboard 3d glasses 😀

Had an idea for a circuit city type thing and I am not much of a javascript programmer so I used AI. These are 3 revisions

Coded this with Chat Gpt, Gemini and Claude over a long back-and-forth session — more art directing than programming. It's a generative circuit-city system:

The last one has ~280 procedural motifs (pipe U-bends, DNA helixes, coils, button grids, bead chains) placed in clustered neighborhoods, then connected by bundled orthogonal routes with proper SVG arc corners.

5 pen passes on A3 Yellow, Orange, Green, Red, Blue  0.4mm fine points. Each color is its own layer so I can swap pens between passes. Pure Node.js, ~1200 lines, no dependencies. The whole piece evolved through iteration — tweaking colors, spacing, corner radii, motif weights — until it felt right.

Another piece built from the same Grains algorithm, but this time as a two-layer plot. The reddish pink layer runs horizontally, and the sky blue layer runs vertically, with each one driven by a different pixel configuration/simulation. Both simulations were paused and exported after 10 frames, and unlike the earlier checkerboard-based versions, these started from concentric circles. 19" x 24", Tombow markers on bristol paper

Two more in the 'old files, new ink' category. Same inks as my last post if curious.

11"x15"

Fountain pen ink on watercolor paper

Another variation built from my Grains algorithm. I started with an 8-color palette and treated each pixel color as its own state, then mapped every state to a unique tile of horizontal lines. Different areas of the pixels were shifted, stretched, and compressed using a mix of 1-layer Moore neighborhood, 16-direction neighborhood, and 2-layer Moore neighborhood rules. After that, adjacent segments were joined into longer continuous paths to make the drawing more efficient for pen plotting. Total plot time was about 5 hours!

The wife is really into StarWars so I have been printing these. The piano one turned out sooo good.

Come say Hi if you are in Montréal, I'll be plotting some drawings for the next 2 weeks @ Caserne 26

Just plottet my first portraits. It is converted into lineart with a python script which i made huge changes to. Done on Uunatek 3.0, Aquarell A4 paper, Rotring 0,35mm

Do you guys have any method to get a similar look for your portrait convertion? Drawingbot is amazing, but i dont get the „look“ i wanted.

apparently i can only upload one video and i'm not able to combine video and images in the post so i chose to just stitch up a little montage. i know we like to see the results on paper so i'll see if i can comment with an image of a finished piece that was generated with the app.

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i made this app for plotting and figured i'd share it with you all. i basically just wanted to do "cool math shit" so i figured i'd whip something up real quick and then one thing led to another and here we are. pretty much crammed everything i thought might be useful/fun in to one app. it's not gonna replace inkscape or other serious tools, but it makes doing certain things pretty easy and has a shitload of options, parameters, settings etc. and really it's just fun to play around with.

yes, i used the ai machine to make this. i basically took everything i could find and dumped it in. i honestly can't remember all the resources i used as references, but seriously, thank you to everyone who's shared their code/projects/etc with the community.

there are still a number of things to be improved, but for the most part it's working alright.

there is an option in the settings for a replicate.com api key. this is totally optional. i added it for background removal, depth maps and auto masking. without the api key these features will just be disabled.

a note on exports: the ai overlords thought it would be cool to throw the axidraw stuff in there, but i don't own an axidraw (or anything compatible) so if anyone with one of those feels like testing that feature out that would be cool. let me know if it works out for you. same with the gcode export, i was about to test that out, but i broke one of my motor drivers and haven't gotten around to fixing it yet. the Mural export is a custom file type that will work with the Mural wall plotter, but you will need to flash a custom firmware (also available on my github)

anyway, check it out if you like. it's free, open source, MIT license, all that jazz. i know a lot of people on here have their own algorithms which way cool. maybe this could give you ideas or inspiration. or just pick apart the code and use what you like for your own project.

https://github.com/pywkt/plottter

here's the ai generated description from the readme that lists a bunch of features:

33 generators across math art, image-to-lines, 3D, and audio:

Math Art — Parametric curves, polar curves, modular multiplication, Perlin noise flow fields (with quantized and rectilinear modes), superformula fields, L-system fractals, grid patterns, concentric rings, dot grids, geometric grids, Voronoi/Delaunay tessellation, Penrose aperiodic tiling, and text rendering
Image to Lines — Edge detection (Canny), hatching (with oscillation mode), flow field/squiggle, Voronoi stippling (with TSP single-line mode), contour lines, XDoG, FDoG (coherent lines), hedcut portraits, scanline halftone, circular scribble, LIC, TAM, dot grid halftone, spiral portraits, sketch (iterative darkest-trace-erase with hybrid marks), mosaic hatching (triangles/Voronoi/rectangles/hexagons/quadtree/superpixels), and ASCII art

3D Scene — Wireframe, hatched/shaded, and perspective-hatched rendering with hidden line removal, 10+ primitive shapes, OBJ/STL mesh import and slicing, camera controls, and shadow effects
Audio — Import WAV, MP3, FLAC, or OGG files and generate plotter-ready visualizations: Joy Division-style ridgeline spectrograms with hidden line removal, circular and spiral waveforms, spectrogram contour maps, frequency band separation, and stereo Lissajous figures
Multi-layer system with per-layer pen colors and opacity, drag reorder, visibility/lock controls, and color separation (K-Means, Luminance, RGB, CMYK).

Mask painting with brush, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and pen tools. AI-powered mask generation via point prompts, box prompts, or text descriptions (Replicate SAM-2). Per-project mask library for saving and reusing masks. Mask refinement with feather and grow/shrink controls.

Export formats: SVG (mm coordinates), HPGL (vintage plotters), G-code (CNC/servo), Mural (wall-mounted plotters), and direct AxiDraw USB control.

Post-processing tools: Path optimization (nearest-neighbor + 2-opt + 3-opt + Or-opt), simplification, merge, clip, weld overlapping paths, Bezier curve fitting, path tapering (fade stroke width at endpoints), path offsetting (parallel curves), and a brush system (stippled, multi-stroke, calligraphic).

Other features: Stroke-order animation, pen-up travel visualization, pen jitter simulation, AI result caching, auto contrast and unsharp mask preprocessing, CLI batch mode, extensible plugin system (generators, processing, and export format plugins), Google Fonts integration, and AI-powered depth maps and background removal via Replicate.

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i'll just add one more thing; it's a lot harder to just do "cool math shit" than i expected. much respect to you all who are making such awesome stuff and posting it on here for us.

White and blue ink on paper