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Drawing Machines

drawingmachines.org

188 pointsTheAceOfHearts26 comments

Pantographs are used in woodworking too! Put a router in place of a pen and have the stylus trace a jig and you're cutting accurate, repeatable tenons! Here's an example https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/setup.html

They're also used horizontally to trace letters/drawings into wood as in the traditional use of the pantograph https://woodgears.ca/pantograph/index.html

I've also seen a pantograph unit on a flame cutter; instead of manually tracing a jig it had a magnetic follower, so one created a maquette out of thin sheet metal by some other method, and then it would cut the same/scaled shape out of massive (5cm?) steel.

Probably more fun than a CNC router, which is another DIY project I've seen popping up in lieue of more expensive options.

Great website — the About page is the best part IMO. Preempted my snark beautifully, and taught me something somewhat profound about art!

> What isn't a Drawing Machine?

> A drawing must be drawn: photography and inkjet printers are ways to mechanize the image-making process, but they are not drawing machines. Drawing is the slow reveal, the gradual accumulation of contours and marks into an image…

> In this larger etymological context, producing a picture by making lines and marks — to draw — literally means to pull or drag a pencil or pen across a surface. It is a physical act. It is active pursuit, emphasis on pursuit. You chase, seek, and pursue the final drawing

Sharing a drawing machine I designed and wrote about a few years ago but never published: an analog mechanism for producing digital conic projection perspectives inspired by Piero Della Francesca’s “Other Method,” which is essentially a 15th century drawing algorithm for sampling a point cloud and representing it in 2D perspective. I can convert this into a blog post if people are interested. Unfortunately my professor kept the actual machine for their “collection”…

Write up/reflections: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wz86p0z0exxlaj5omhtfa/the-oth...

Abstracted visualization of the algorithm and animation of the mechanism: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/pst87255tjt9nvpqwloyp/the-oth...

Fascinating stuff. Thanks.

I teach drawing from observation. I start off with talking about projection and drawing machines then show them how to create their own 'conceptual'mdrawing machine using nothing but the straight edge of a pencil. The trick is to identify points in the scene (intersections, corners, features etc) which corespond to each other on a vertical or horizontal axis. with a few of those done, the whole drawing drops into place.

Edit. Unless I am missing something, I see no mention of Van Goghs sighting grid. Crude, but effective.

http://www.vangoghreproductions.com/art-techniques/perspecti...

I presume your course is in-person, otherwise you would've promoted it.

Can you recommend books or other resources that use your approach (or similar)?

As you imply, drawing from observation is a skill that is best taught in person. The students mostly learn from being corrected, which I do directly to their drawings.

However, I did put together some material on the subject. I'm not sure how useful it is (some of it could have been better written).

My module on perspective: https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules/699526

My module on drawing: https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules/696832

...in which I address transference (i.e. projection): https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules/items/328...

> Can you recommend books or other resources that use your approach (or similar)?

Drawing 100 years ago is pretty much the same as now. Here are a bunch of great (free) books all over 40 years old, yet still valid.

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/drawing-fre...

My approach is not significantly different to that which most competent drawing teachers would employ. However, I believe that my use of language is a bit more consistent and exact than most artists, who tend to be a bit hand-wavey in their language usage. Practices that are termed one thing in 'book a' are termed something completely different in 'book b'. I learned the value of consistency and exactitude from collaborating with computer engineers, which is one reason I like lurking in HN.

I had a friend that interned for a state senator and she operated the "Robo Pen" to sign correspondence. I was impressed to see this listed on the site: https://www.drawingmachines.org/post.php?id=207

Well that ended up being a hour long rat hole. So many awesome pictures.

Pretty much the only way to get a hold of these in South America is to either buy a cricut (or similar proprietary solution) or buy a Chinese one.

I wish these were a bit more popular! I think drawing bots will never be as useful or popular as 3d printers so we might be stuck with poor solutions or building our own. The axidraw software is open source but I'm not sure there's been a whole lot of effort into adapting it to open hardware solutions. Though there's a project on thingverse that seems compatible.

Is a 3D printer closer to a drawing machine or a conventional printer. I think of printers as working on pixels (maybe I’m wrong about this) while drawing machines and 3D printers have lines as their primitives, right? Maybe 3D printers could become drawing machine, haha. 3D to 2D drawing machine project: project on a plane.

I look at a 3D printer as an additive counterpart to a CNC machine. I think the lack of a z-axis is what separates drawing machines.

Drawing machine, its a popular small project to print a pen adapter and use them to draw

> Is a 3D printer closer to a drawing machine or a conventional printer?

I believe so. The ancient Greeks would scale up a sculpture using a cage placed around it. XYZ coordinates would br drawn from this using measuring sticks. This is, effectively, an analog version of our 3D printers and also an. Extra dimentional version of a drawing machine.

I bought an Axidraw a while back (and love it!) but having seen a lot of the homegrown ones I feel like it's a relatively lower-level project assuming you're good with working with steppers and motors.

I've seen wall-sized vertical ones that work with a microcontroller, some threads and a few servers.

The era of drawing machines already came and went, and it wasn't 3D printers that killed them.

The more-common term for a "drawing machine" is a "plotter", no?

(I guess you wouldn't normally call a non-automated "drawing machine" a plotter — but why is that?)

That's one of them, as mentioned on the site. ;)

Plotter is a drawing machine connected to a computer

Hah. I bought and tried to use a pantograph. It was fun, but seemed only accurate for scaling up or down over a limited range of scales. Obviously I'm a terrible amateur at using them, so perhaps it was a skill issue...

Myself and some other local artists salvaged and built a NC based stepper motor driven wall mounted drawing machine that held a sharpie and drew SVGs out of illustrator. Was neat demo at the time.

Really neat site. Would love to see the pages for each machine type link to a curated list of modern implementations, especially plans to make such a device yourself.

So many hopeful (?) patents on this stuff - kinda sad to see.

Thank You. I may use part of that when teaching Geometry.

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