Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting

https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/watercolour-plots

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

229 14 2 years ago

rdtsc2• 2 years ago

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.

bearjaws• 2 years ago

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

rdtsc2• 2 years ago

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.

penneyd• 2 years ago

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

zem• 2 years ago

that's a wonderfully creative idea!

Daub• 2 years ago

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.

jszymborski• 2 years ago

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.

doctorhandshake• 2 years ago

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.

cancerhacker• 2 years ago

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/

doubloon• 2 years ago

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

chrischen• 2 years ago

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...

boo-ga-ga• 2 years ago

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.

Applejinx• 2 years ago

Lovely work, brightened my morning :)

yboris• 2 years ago

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 love her work: https://x.com/Licia_He

Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting

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