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I love plotter art and have dabbled a bit myself. The really fun part is how pen-on-paper is not completely reliable or a perfect line. You get a little texture if the pen skips. You can use watercolor pens that bleed. You can get crazy with something like Copic markers on Yupo paper so the whole thing stays wet and smears for minutes. It's part of the art.
This bit from the article made me laugh ruefully though: "it's as simple as buying some black paper and a white gel pen." You can get some beautiful effects with white ink on black paper but it is notoriously difficult to get looking good. White ink is tricky stuff. But that's part of the fun!
A lot of it comes down to which pens you happen to have - I’ve had some success with Sakura gelly rolls for white, and also more recently have been enjoying sharpie creative acrylic markers which has a moderately opaque white ink. I’ve also had some really frustrating experiences with some other pens and instruments!
Classic plotter art as performance art video: https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_schachter_how_i_turned_frus...
After rewatching that, I did a one-shot remake in p5js: https://g.co/gemini/share/b983a93e3ae2
Is there actual plotter simulation software I could be using?
For converting images to plots there is this: https://mitxela.com/plotterfun/
that’s me giving the talk btw
I only make art designed to be printed on 10-12 color large format inkjet printers. Making plotter art is not inherently better or worse that printing, it's just a different type of art. I love what people do with plotters, but I just prefer doing printed versions, since what I make is often not possible with a plotter, as I deal in pixels (up to 200+ megapixels), and plotters deal in vectors. It's like Photoshop vs Illustrator, the don't compete as much as specialize in different things. https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
I’m sure you know this but it took me entirely too long to really understand and feel the satisfaction of taking and printing my own photos.
It’s very accessible these days to have a finished piece of art that’s all yours - even with little artistic ability.
Agreed 100%. It all comes down to the artists intentions, and plotters have many limitations. My hope for this article was to expose people to other options.
Great portfolio of art btw, thanks for sharing!
Yup, if your art was sculpture or dance, then a printer or plotter are equally useless.
Good stuff! Those would make nice textiles too.
I always thought of plotters as legacy tech, but considering the variety of marking tools you can attach to the head, I'm wondering if I should get one.
Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?
I made one for roughly $100 USD from an Arduino, steel rods, some stepper motors, and some 3D printed parts.
Having an existing 3d printer is a bit “draw the rest of the owl” for this, but being able to extend and modify a device like a pen plotter is pretty nice.
AxiDraw from Evil Mad Scientist was what a lot of us were buying a few years ago. He's now part of Bantam Tools and is making a thing called the NextDraw. Same design but better built and a lot more expensive. https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw
There's a world of cheaper unbranded Chinese plotters that folks are using that seem to work well. Quality does matter, you want something very precise and stable.
Cricuts (and similar cutters, and multi-mode tools like the Xtool M1 and Bambu Lab H2D) have pen attachments
I thought “evil mad science” had an inexpensive one. Including one the would pen plot on eggs. (Not available)
https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/171
And a 2d minimalist plotter.
https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846
They seem to have been bought. Those pro plotters look nice though quite pricy. The page still has good resources.
A lot of people design and build their own custom pen plotters, with varying level of precision:
https://note.com/penplotter/n/n4fdf6959738a
The page is in Japanese, but you can get a feel of things through the embedded videos. One of them links to this instructables page in English:
You could find a Silhouette Portrait 2 on eBay pretty cheaply. It has a reasonable range of tools, python and inkscape support and a reasonable, documented protocol.
As a side note, I bought an Aliexpress $25 'hanging arduino plotter' - I was never able to get good results from it sadly - though I felt a learnt a lot from it and scratched the plotter itch that I had.
I'd also be very interested in a 'good' cheapish plotter - to try a few things that I was never able to with the extra low quality one that I bought
A typical filament 3d printer is just a pen plotter with a fancy toolhead and an extra fancy 'pen up'. ( I explained to a friend once that a pen plotter is doom (2.5d) and a 3d printer is quake). Hell a laser cutter is just a pen plotter with a pen you turn off instead of lifting.
Doesn't seem so 'legacy' to me.
We've got a couple at the engineering/automation company I work for. They're huge, probably 8 feet long at least. No idea what they were used for - they belonged to the engineering group. Unfortunately I can't ask because they all quit.
Not legacy at all. Think construction/cabinetry plans etc. Plotters are not inexpensive unless you build one.
The LY Drawbot on Aliexpress is around $110 USD and it's quite good.
Im on my second Bantam tools next draw and love it. Having made a similar transition from generative art to printmaking with a risograph and drawing with a pen plotter; I love the slow physical process of using them.
My dad worked for Control Data in the 1980s and talks about hiding designs in period characters on his schematics. Talks about how the plotters would get to the period, hang out for a while and then continue.
Printers using CMYK isn't strictly true, right? Aren't you able to choose the ink colors when getting prints professionally made?
You're correct, there are some more sophisticated processes used by specialty printers such as CcMmYK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcMmYK_color_model). Something like this will use more inks and less halftones, giving better results in some cases.
Or are you referring to other printing methods, say for example silk screening? There, you would definitely select a specific ink to use. It just depends on what your goals are.
I had a summer job working at a print software company and they had a large format printer with, if I remember correctly, 12 different ink colours. These weren't spot colours - though that's also an example of going outside CMYK - but meant the printer supported a very wide colour gamut and subtle colour grading.
Anyway, yes, professional printing can go beyond just CMYK in various ways.
Yes, giclee printers typically have ten or more inks, and Risograph printers offer a wider but limited set of options.
At work we have CMYKW printers, which add an extra channel of white ink to the mix.
I have a Canon Pixma Pro 100 and it uses 8 different inks. The “Pro” really means professional. When used with the correct paper, it produces the same high quality prints as any professional service.
Looking at the artwork on my wall, there’s two big things that set prints apart from an original artwork. 1. Computer software doesn’t capture the imperfection of a physical medium. 2. Printers can’t reproduce the texture of layered colors.
Great article. I’ve only ever came across plotters used for tech drawings cad cam archtecture but i hadnt considered them applied to artistic output. Well done makes me want one now.
Really common for textiles/apparel, also. The companies that produce plotters, cutters, and digitizers like Velocity and GTCO Calcomp notably service the same industries.
Harold Cohen was a British painter in the ‘60s who ended up in the Stanford AI lab in 1971, using plotters (and initially turtle robots) to draw images created by a chunk of code he called AARON. There are some bits of that code - particularly the ‘freehand line algorithm’ and its collision detection allowing lines to meet without crossing - that I can’t really understand how they worked on such primitive hardware & software:
https://www.katevassgalerie.com/blog/harold-cohen-aaron-comp...
I splurged on a iDraw H SE - A3/A2 earlier this year and have been coding / making birthday cards for friends and family all summer.
I feel like I get asked a lot the same questions and I think this article describes it best. Like yes I could have just upgraded to a nicer printer, but there is something fun about the process of getting an artwork plotted that makes it fun for me.
I need to upload some of my plots to share.
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On a similar note for others who want to get into this, there was a thread awhile back on "What is the 90% activity in your favorite hobby", for example sanding taking 90% of the time for woodworking. For pen plotting the 90-95% is the art side. Taking images, converting them into g-code either via SVG or other processes, or writing code to make generative art, that is the 90%.
At the end of the day the pen plotting itself at the surface level is a projection of the effort taken to generate the art. Where it gets really exciting is the capabilities and unique aspect of the medium (like touching on white ink or watercolor) that create truly unique ways of presenting the art.
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Some related subreddits:
Reading this, I think of paper technology that has probably been lost.
I remember using flatbed plotters with a "static-cling" button. (maybe HP?)
you clicked the button out, put paper on the flatbed, then clicked the button in and a static charge sucked the paper down and held it in place.
You would generate your plots using a language that could select various color pens, move to x1,y1, pen down, move to x2,y2, pen up, etc...
I think better printers and then inkjets are what finally killed them off.
Having worked extensively on large charcoal drawings using heavy etching paper, I’ve often imagined what it would be like if a proper robotic arm could take on the task. My own process involves compressed charcoal pencils, plenty of erasers, and various grades of sandpaper, really working the surface of the paper. And watching out not to scratch or dimple the paper.
Plotters are usually limited in how they can tilt the pen, and their force-feedback capabilities are quite primitive, if present. And if you’ve ever tried sharpening a compressed charcoal pencil to a fine point, you’ll know how difficult that would be to automate.
If I ever happen to find four spare years tucked away somewhere, I might just attempt to build such a system myself :/
Edit: to get an idea of what is possible with this technique, see the work of Annie Murphy Robinson [1], who also hosts workshops.
As a plotter artist also, I'm super happy to see this article on HN.
The difference is that (almost) everyone has a printer, and a printer is only any good if it reproduces the image it prints exactly - and where's the fun in that? With plotters, you can do all the cool things described in the article, plus they have the advantage of being much more exotic, kind of like the LCD monitor sitting on your desk vs. the vector display used for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game)
I got lucky and picked up a second hand HP-7475A for $50 about five years ago. It's the GPIB version, not native RS-232, so I also had to find a way to connect it to a modern PC. Ended up going with a GPIB<->USB adapter from AliExpress (about 10x cheaper than one from Prologix) to plug it into an RPi, which I can use to send HPGL files to get plotted.
Also got a friend to hack away a chunk of the plastic casing with a circular saw so I could use pen adapters for modern Sharpie and Stabilo markers, which are much easier and cheaper to acquire than old format plotter pens.
I remember doing plotter artwork at Professor Harry Holland's Art & the Computer Lab back in the 1980s. We could draw in 8 colors!
They were also huge for architectural drawings.
I used to have an Epson Hi-80 plotter someone gifted me. Somebody else gifted it to themselves, so I never had a chance to play with it. But it had a centronics interface and could be set to emulate an Epson RX-80 dor matric printer. Never considered it for printing text, but why couldn't it with Epson emulation?
I still remember the old "CreataCard" machines. They were a lot of fun to use and watch. (They very much understood and leveraged the fact that the customer purchasing a greeting card is not the recipient; making it fun to watch and fun to give was a major selling point.)
If you're doing serious plotting to come up with outstandng paperwork, it's expected to require a lot more careful planning than the everyday willy-nilly printing people are accustomed to ;)
I have a failed 1x1m cnc build due to a lack of rigidity. I'm in the process of rebuilding it as a wall mounted plotter in my office. I could spend all day watching it move
I have a really cheap one that seems to apply uneven pressure across the bed. Has anyone worked with any sort of spring loaded holder that could help that sort of problem?
I do work with a a few plotters, both pre petis buyout EMS plotter, a vintage HP, and a custom built plotter.
Everything he says here is true, but to me at the end of the day after running some of my work off on very high end inkjets and dyesubs. It's just not the same. There is an inherent, and i'm not sure how to fully communicate this, physicality to a plotted artwork. Slight imperfections in ink flow, the way fountain ink behaves when lines cross, the way the ink bleeds into the medium you are plotting on, the inks (or other mediums) you can choose vs what you can put through an inkjet. It's like comparing an oil painting to even a high quality print of that oil painting. You lose texture going to inkjet.
For whit inks how about uv printers?
>The keyword here, though, is reproduction. A printer isn't capable of mixing pigments the same way an artist mixes paints on a palette.
This is kinda no longer true. Computer tools such as “krita” (open source) do an exceptional job emulating paints and brushes. A lot of professional illustrations now days are done digitally and printed. “Art” less so but the tablets keep getting better.
As someone who was kinda adept at making black and white prints from negatives, I kind of miss some of the old tech (making prints was a little magical). But digital / ink jet can get you 90% of the darkroom much easier and has some serious advantages.
I do applaud the effort and the fun factor here is real. Those pen plotters are neat and enough different to make this an interesting niche.