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Art: Drawbot Update
12th August 2012

So far I've been testing different drawing techniques with the drawbot, now I have some experience of what works I have a few projects that I really want to work on.

Until then here's a roundup of the work I've done so far:

Here are some procedurally generated trees, these are randomly seeded - I choose the sets that look the way I want:

procedural trees

I have two colour drawbot plots, using 4 stippled CMYK plots, the second is new and has the largest number of stipples yet - 6000 in each of four layers.

CMYK full-colour stipples

The image below is generated from bitmaps by converting the darkness values into waves, these can be drawn tightly for dark areas and looser for light areas.  There's a more detailed image below it.  This technique is really fun to watch being made; I like the analogue element that the dynamics of the drawbot add into the precise digital source:

wave drawbot image

drawbot waves detail

This image is generated from bitmap with another process, vertical strips are varied in width.  Because of the process some darker areas become lighter than in the source and this filter brings an interesting effect into the result like the Photoshop 'curves' process:

strip-based drawbot bitmap

detail of drawbot strips process

The image below is the drawbot running - all of the test images so far have been A3 landscape on Bristol board - I hope to scale up to A2 or A1 portrait soon.

the drawbot running


fastness - Iain Banks Graphics
Fastness - Iain Banks Graphics
All of the content from my Iain M Banks website, now shifted to be a section in this one

fastness - Links & Resources:
Processing:
An open source programming tool aimed at artists, engineers and designers.  Simple, light and Java-based with a wealth of libraries and a strong user community

Shapeways:
3D printing for the masses - plastics and metal to your design or team up with a desigenr to personalise a design with a 'co-creator'.  Visit my Shapeways shop for some things I've designed.

Meshlab:
MeshLab is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes

Blender:
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License

Gimp:
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages

Inkscape:
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format

Ponoko:
Retail laser cutting outlet with centres in New Zealand, USA, Germany, Italy and the UK (if not more by now)

Eclipse:
Java development environment