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!
Get some platinum preppys and some 'converters' (they both cost about $7, but the converter means that changing out inks is much less of an issue) and the whole world of fountain pen inks is your oyster... and there are some really interesting inks out there.
Also an interesting instrument that i've played with. Japanese refillable brush pens. You can get a really fine line out of them if you position them just right and great flow. One of the toolheads I built for my custom plotter uses a stepper instead of a hobby servo for pen lift (originally just so i didn't have to hear those little gears grind and for reliability) and i've been working on code so that I can vary the 'z' over the course of a line for use with brushpens.
White is tough, and I've never found a white ink that doesn't just fuck up a fountain pen... sakura gelly rolls are really the best that i've used, and even they can be testy.
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.
Yup! Both epson and canon have some great printers for high quality printing at home. First Man Photography on YouTube has videos on the topic that I enjoyed.
The surprise for me was that paper quality makes much of the difference.
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.
I had a shirt from a piece made at Printful, but it's way too small (even at XXXL) for a normal person. It is cool to see though. I wish I could find a tailor who actually makes dress shirts, and have the fabic made at Spoonflower.
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.
I paid $475 for an AxiDraw V3 (A4 size) in 2021. I'm not saying the new machines are bad value, they seem very nicely built. But it's definitely less of an impulse purchase at $1000.
Yes. But no geek should be getting a Cricut when the Silhouette machines exist and are not so locked down and cloud encumbered.
ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably want something more modular and larger anyway, but the Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.
Seconded. My Silhouette is great. I even emailed them and received a copy of the GPGL docs one time. It wasn't full on support, but they were willing to give me a start.
The first thing I programmed was having it draw a hilbert curve and it worked great!
The Bantam 'Next Draw' is what EMS used to sell. I bet it probably still uses the same board as the eggbot to drive it. Their new ones in a frame are cool, but one of the cool things with the nextdraw style is that you can plot on things that you can't fit in the frames.
I've used my axidraw to plot on floors and walls in the past.
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
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.
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.
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.
Large-scale stuff like blueprints is the obvious explanation, but the largest plotter I've ever personally seen was owned by an oil exploration company and used to graph their seismic test results. Only about 5 feet wide (just over 1.5 m), though.
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.
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.
"gicleé" is just a neologism that means "I will charge my customers more to recoup the capital cost of this large inkjet printer" and doesn't really have any inherent meaning as to the number of inks.
To print on non-white paper? But I think then the ordinary cyan, magenta and yellow inks can't be used. Normally those are translucent in order to create red, green and blue via subtractive color mixing. E.g. overlaying yellow and magenta dots creates a red dot.
But if the paper can't be assumed to be white, CMY need to be opaque, otherwise yellow on black paper would just look black. Then you can no longer create red, green and blue. So you need additional red, green and blue pigment, likewise opaque. So "CMYRGBKW". Then the other colors can be mixed via dithering the eight base colors as usual.
Or maybe your printer still needs white paper, and the white pigment has some other use?
Yes, though that would mean they need to stack three drops for red, green and blue, rather than two as in CMYK. Which might create some quality issues. At least CMYK printers avoid the triple stacking for black which CMY printers would have to do. With CMYRGBKW there would be no dot stacking (subtractive color mixing) required at all, resulting in less required ink. Though needing eight base inks rather than the five in CMYKW might be a larger disadvantage.
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.
I wonder how much does it cost per full color letter-size print?
How often do you need to clean nozzles (and how much ink is spent)?
I have Epson EcoTank, which is great since I can refill it from the ink bottles (even non-Epson), but since it gets only occasional use for color printing, almost every time I have to clean nozzles before printing in color.
I’ve had it for at least 6 years. It barely uses ink and has no problem sitting off for months. I’ve never cleaned the nozzles. I printed 40+ 13x19 (2.5 A4s) full-color prints and at least that many sketches in grayscale and only 3 cartridges got low. I’ve only replaced a full set once at a cost of $120. High-grade 13x19 paper costs $0.30 per sheet. Even factoring in that the printer cost $700, it’s already paid for itself several times.
The only real issue is it’s very slow. It takes minutes to wake up and full-color photo-quality A4 prints take at least a minute. More if you’re doing 13x19.
Now, if you’re doing fast full-color on cheap office paper, you bought the wrong printer. :)
My experience with Epson printers is they use absolute obscene amounts of ink and gum up if they get lonely.
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.
If sanding took even 10% of my time I'd give up the hobby. Fortunately my girlfriend loves that kind of mindless work and does all the finishing that's more than "slap some BLO on it and call it good."
I crochet and weaving in loose ends / tying up works is the 90%, but I love making shit for myself every once in awhile and I can cut all the corners I want and just tie a knot and call it a day lol I feel you
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.
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.
But this is quite a new model and I don't remember seeing this technology anywhere else for a long while, so perhaps they had to wait for some patent to expire?
These machines also have swappable tools (effectively a two tool changer).
I think ultimately the plotter largely became the vinyl cutter.
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?
A common trick (also often needed when using non-gel ballpoints) is to add some extra weight to the pen (for example, put a small glass jar/cup upside down over the pen, or use some large machine nuts).
Beware that this is harder on the servo lifting the pen, so you may want to order a few extra of those (also at TaoBao/AliExpress). I've switched from the cheap SG90 servos that are often used to the only slightly more expensive MG90S with all metal gears that seem to do better.
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.
Those are two completely different things. Nothing to do with UV fluorescent inks. UV printers use special inks which are cured by UV light instead of relying on solvent evaporation like most inks. A bit similar to UV cured resins used by SLA printers or UV cured glues. This makes it easier to print on various materials like metal, glass, and ceramics. UV printing can be done in multiple layers to add 3d texture or using bottom white layer as primer thus providing better colors regardless of base material color.
>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.
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!
JetPens has been an invaluable resource for learning about and buying pens. Their blog is great: https://www.jetpens.com/blog
Get some platinum preppys and some 'converters' (they both cost about $7, but the converter means that changing out inks is much less of an issue) and the whole world of fountain pen inks is your oyster... and there are some really interesting inks out there.
Also an interesting instrument that i've played with. Japanese refillable brush pens. You can get a really fine line out of them if you position them just right and great flow. One of the toolheads I built for my custom plotter uses a stepper instead of a hobby servo for pen lift (originally just so i didn't have to hear those little gears grind and for reliability) and i've been working on code so that I can vary the 'z' over the course of a line for use with brushpens.
White is tough, and I've never found a white ink that doesn't just fuck up a fountain pen... sakura gelly rolls are really the best that i've used, and even they can be testy.
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.
Are there decent at home photos printers nowadays? I was always underwhelmed with the old inkjet soggy paper prints.
Yup! Both epson and canon have some great printers for high quality printing at home. First Man Photography on YouTube has videos on the topic that I enjoyed.
The surprise for me was that paper quality makes much of the difference.
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 had a shirt from a piece made at Printful, but it's way too small (even at XXXL) for a normal person. It is cool to see though. I wish I could find a tailor who actually makes dress shirts, and have the fabic made at Spoonflower.
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.
You can also pick up used older printers (like the Ender 3) secondhand VERY cheap and convert them.
But wouldn't you need to have the plotter working to draw the rest of that owl? so it seems like a chicken and egg situation as well
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.
Looks like the Bantam Tools ones start at just under a thousand. How much were the AxiDraw units originally?
I paid $475 for an AxiDraw V3 (A4 size) in 2021. I'm not saying the new machines are bad value, they seem very nicely built. But it's definitely less of an impulse purchase at $1000.
I think I paid a little over 700 for mine a few years back.
Cricuts (and similar cutters, and multi-mode tools like the Xtool M1 and Bambu Lab H2D) have pen attachments
Yes. But no geek should be getting a Cricut when the Silhouette machines exist and are not so locked down and cloud encumbered.
ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably want something more modular and larger anyway, but the Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.
Seconded. My Silhouette is great. I even emailed them and received a copy of the GPGL docs one time. It wasn't full on support, but they were willing to give me a start.
The first thing I programmed was having it draw a hilbert curve and it worked great!
Ooh, did you do a blog article about it perhaps? I think I read it, if so.
It's 14 years old at this point, but here you go: https://www.ohthehugemanatee.net/2011/07/gpgl-reference-cour...
Yep that’s the one. Thank you for it. :-)
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.
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/
The Bantam 'Next Draw' is what EMS used to sell. I bet it probably still uses the same board as the eggbot to drive it. Their new ones in a frame are cool, but one of the cool things with the nextdraw style is that you can plot on things that you can't fit in the frames.
I've used my axidraw to plot on floors and walls in the past.
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:
https://www.instructables.com/Mini-Plotter-V2/
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
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.
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.
Large-scale stuff like blueprints is the obvious explanation, but the largest plotter I've ever personally seen was owned by an oil exploration company and used to graph their seismic test results. Only about 5 feet wide (just over 1.5 m), though.
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.
Or they could be referring to Spot Color.
One of my favorites is spot gloss.
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.
"gicleé" is just a neologism that means "I will charge my customers more to recoup the capital cost of this large inkjet printer" and doesn't really have any inherent meaning as to the number of inks.
Yes. With a limited carve-out for anyone still running an Iris, who originated that neologism in a much more sceptical market.
At work we have CMYKW printers, which add an extra channel of white ink to the mix.
To print on non-white paper? But I think then the ordinary cyan, magenta and yellow inks can't be used. Normally those are translucent in order to create red, green and blue via subtractive color mixing. E.g. overlaying yellow and magenta dots creates a red dot.
But if the paper can't be assumed to be white, CMY need to be opaque, otherwise yellow on black paper would just look black. Then you can no longer create red, green and blue. So you need additional red, green and blue pigment, likewise opaque. So "CMYRGBKW". Then the other colors can be mixed via dithering the eight base colors as usual.
Or maybe your printer still needs white paper, and the white pigment has some other use?
opaque white + translucent CMY would work, assuming you can get a white formulation that doesn’t gum up the print head.
Yes, though that would mean they need to stack three drops for red, green and blue, rather than two as in CMYK. Which might create some quality issues. At least CMYK printers avoid the triple stacking for black which CMY printers would have to do. With CMYRGBKW there would be no dot stacking (subtractive color mixing) required at all, resulting in less required ink. Though needing eight base inks rather than the five in CMYKW might be a larger disadvantage.
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.
I wonder how much does it cost per full color letter-size print? How often do you need to clean nozzles (and how much ink is spent)?
I have Epson EcoTank, which is great since I can refill it from the ink bottles (even non-Epson), but since it gets only occasional use for color printing, almost every time I have to clean nozzles before printing in color.
I’ve had it for at least 6 years. It barely uses ink and has no problem sitting off for months. I’ve never cleaned the nozzles. I printed 40+ 13x19 (2.5 A4s) full-color prints and at least that many sketches in grayscale and only 3 cartridges got low. I’ve only replaced a full set once at a cost of $120. High-grade 13x19 paper costs $0.30 per sheet. Even factoring in that the printer cost $700, it’s already paid for itself several times.
The only real issue is it’s very slow. It takes minutes to wake up and full-color photo-quality A4 prints take at least a minute. More if you’re doing 13x19.
Now, if you’re doing fast full-color on cheap office paper, you bought the wrong printer. :)
My experience with Epson printers is they use absolute obscene amounts of ink and gum up if they get lonely.
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:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PlotterArt/
https://www.reddit.com/r/PenPlotters/
If sanding took even 10% of my time I'd give up the hobby. Fortunately my girlfriend loves that kind of mindless work and does all the finishing that's more than "slap some BLO on it and call it good."
I crochet and weaving in loose ends / tying up works is the 90%, but I love making shit for myself every once in awhile and I can cut all the corners I want and just tie a knot and call it a day lol I feel you
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.
[1] https://anniemurphyrobinson.com/
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’ve always wanted to get one of these working, but they’re rare, and heavy! That makes shipping expensive.
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.
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.
> 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.
Interestingly, this technology is not lost, and it is in a current vinyl cutter/plotter, the Silhouette Curio 2:
https://www.silhouetteamerica.com/curio-2
But this is quite a new model and I don't remember seeing this technology anywhere else for a long while, so perhaps they had to wait for some patent to expire?
These machines also have swappable tools (effectively a two tool changer).
I think ultimately the plotter largely became the vinyl cutter.
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?
A common trick (also often needed when using non-gel ballpoints) is to add some extra weight to the pen (for example, put a small glass jar/cup upside down over the pen, or use some large machine nuts).
Beware that this is harder on the servo lifting the pen, so you may want to order a few extra of those (also at TaoBao/AliExpress). I've switched from the cheap SG90 servos that are often used to the only slightly more expensive MG90S with all metal gears that seem to do better.
I’m having the same issue. Which model do you have?
Mine is an ultra cheap “hand writing” machine off taobao. There’s not really any specific model since there’s a million clones of them floating around
I’ll probably have to make the holder myself but good to know others have had the same 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?
For plotters, just get a pen with UV ink. Is a UV printer something more fancy?
Those are two completely different things. Nothing to do with UV fluorescent inks. UV printers use special inks which are cured by UV light instead of relying on solvent evaporation like most inks. A bit similar to UV cured resins used by SLA printers or UV cured glues. This makes it easier to print on various materials like metal, glass, and ceramics. UV printing can be done in multiple layers to add 3d texture or using bottom white layer as primer thus providing better colors regardless of base material color.
>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.
https://krita.org/en/
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.