Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting | Hacker News Reader

Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting

amygoodchild.com

229 pointstodsacerdoti14 comments

The artist who seems to have largely inspired this post: Licia He

https://www.eyesofpanda.com/gallery/

She has a course coming up about how to do it: https://www.eyesofpanda.com/project/painting_with_plotters/

I did this for a blog post many many years ago. It was surprising how accurate reproductions would be with just simple dead reckoning. No adjustments were necessary and just by having everything in the same positions it would pretty faithfully recreate the original GCODE.

https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot...

Lovely results, both in the original and in your posts. It’s interesting that by using a particular medium we can achieve very “warm” and human-like appearance even for drawings done by the machines.

One of Evil Mad Scientist’s earlier projects was a watercolor bot[1] as a kickstarter. It was fun, but a bit fiddly.

[1] https://watercolorbot.com/

That's really neat. With layering, brush types, brush techniques, the amount of water on paper and brushes there are so many variations to experiment with.

> using photographs as inputs for representational paintings.

That would be fun, going from a picture to a water color image of it in a few minutes.

I actually have done this with a acrylic pen and a 3d printer.

Currently in progress on scaling it up, I want to get to a 40"x40" scale to have room for a acrylic paint holder or watercolor.

The hardest part of image -> painting is converting svg to gcode, which is full of interesting.. problems.

I might do a build in public stream for it, although its pretty hard to film.

Heres a couple photos: https://imgur.com/a/0QyKQ6z

That looks fantastic. Thank you for sharing! Definitely worth a stream or a similar blog post about it.

Paint does sound quite tricky, all kinds of issues with it, dripping, how long to write before needing to dip the brush, the direction of travel, many other things? But it can be quite neat, a thicker paint could create layers and textures.

A drag knife setup might make the world of difference here, nice little project though.

Lovely work, brightened my morning :)

that's a wonderfully creative idea!

Fascinating. However, a bit disappointing that the result looks like it was hand painted. I would have liked to have seen designs which are impossible for a human to achieve. The conflict between natural media and (for example) exact and complex geometry would have been compelling.

The Perlin noise approached that, but I tend to agree that I would also enjoy seeing something like you describe. Watercolour doesn't sound like it lends itself too much to this but hey maybe that can be the draw.

Agreed – I actually think that the medium of watercolor is oppositional to what makes a lot of plotter art appealing to me. I am attracted to the plotter’s mix of inhuman precision with artifacts from the interaction of the tool and the surface. With watercolor you’d have a tough time retaining the precision so you’re left with something that’s hard to distinguish from what a human could do. Would be interesting to investigate how to bring back some of that precision as it would be something I don’t think I’ve seen in watercolor before.

fascinating. you know i feel like AI will eventually have to create its own art because its a way that intelligent beings learn things.

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