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Comment by eskimobloood | Hacker News Reader

Buying a pen plotter last summer was one of the best decision for a while. As I start my journey into programming with generative art, using macromedia director and processing, I always wanted to be able to create my on physical prints. So for the last months I got back to have fun writing code in my spare time. Some examples: https://twitter.com/eskimobloood/status/1366300689652187140 https://twitter.com/eskimobloood/status/1285159611599933441 https://twitter.com/eskimobloood/status/1373317198119370753

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Just logged in to say that this work is amazing and that I really like your style :)

I also keep coming back to generative art and think about getting a pen plotter for years already. Now I am getting one!

What is this ptpx process? Some kind of postcard exchange? Looks fun, is there more info somewhere?

Yes, stands for plotter twitter postcard exchange. I think there is no real info online. It was organized by Paul Butler[1] on twitter. In the end you but your info into an google sheet and he organized sending out emails with the addresses for your postcards to send to.

[1]https://twitter.com/paulgb

That’s so cool. I had no idea this was a thing and it’s right up my alley.

They look very interesting.

Could you share some resources on how to get into this?

Yeh, +1 to that - have been experimenting with generative art as the basis to my printmaking, and would love to see some more on this..

Sure. The plotter I've bought is the AxiDraw SE/A3[1]. There is an Inkscape plugin so you can easily plot SVG graphics. I generate the SVG graphics using small JavaScript programs. Thats already it. Here[2] is a more detailed resource list to dig into the topic

[1]https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/908 [2]https://project-awesome.org/beardicus/awesome-plotters

Thanks!

I already have a 3D printer and I’ve seen some projects that made it possible to use the 3D printer as a plotter. So probably I’d try that route first.

I was actually more interested in the software aspect to generate those arts.

This a is a really wide field. Basically its starts with one of the standard algorithms, like and l-system, a voronoi diagram, or simple combination of sin and cos to draw shapes. Have a look at thi-ng[1], just as example for a library that has implemented a lot of this kind of algorithms. The next step in my process is to think about how to destroy this forms as most of them are used a lot in this field and become boring. Using perlin noise as input to arguments of the algorithms is one way to do this. The other part is to make most all of the input variables easily changeable as most of the time the whole process is like writing the program and then spend a lot of time adapt the parameters until you get some interesting output. So in the end I have a small Svelte app, using Svelte only cause the data binding for the inputs so simple, which has tons of sliders that renders an SVG that can be saved in the end.

[1]https://github.com/thi-ng/umbrella

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