Christmas cards are here! Plotter painting experiments continue... | Generative art diary

I’m an artist and creative technologist. I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary on Fridays sharing the things I’ve been working on. Thanks for joining me here. 💖

Hello!

Things have been progressing well this week and I’ve got a couple of things to tell you about…

First of all, plotted Christmas Cards are now available in my shop!

It feels like Christmas should still be months and months away (although the cold weather here in London is shifting that feeling) but apparently it’s actually very soon.

Shop Christmas Cards

Secondly, I’ve made a few of my black and gold plotter paintings available for sale! Here are some close ups, you can take a full look in my shop.

Things I’ve done this week

Acrylic Plotting

When we left off last week, I shared some photographs of the circular brush stroke-d black and gold painting. I’ve now edited together the video for that and you can see it on:
Instagram | Tiktok | Youtube

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This is one of the ones available in my shop!

This week I’ve tried more approaches to this technique. I saw a video earlier today that said something like “i am once again shocked to discover that the process of trial and error involves… error” and that felt quite relevant tbh.

For this one I created little sets of slightly curved lines, arranged at different angles. There were some very nice things going on half way through:

…but it turned out there were way too many lines and it ended up being pretty flat after they all crossed over each other (left, below). I added in some long noise field lines (right, below) but this did not improve the situation.

I bought some ‘iridescent’ acrylic paints to try. They don’t seem technically iridescent to me but they are nicely shiny!

For this one I used a version of the circle code. I set it up with 5 colours, placed using Perlin noise. I coded it so that it paints all the circles of each colour at once, to avoid swapping paint all the time.

Again, this one had some nice things going on half way through…

… but obviously painting yellowy/orange over blue creates green and I forgot that every time I’ve done this with the plotter it creates very muddy areas. (Tape’s still on this one as it’s very wet)

I still think there are some cool looking areas in these though, especially when the light hits it for the shimmer!

Definitely a lot learnt here, and looking forward to experimenting more with this!

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That’s all, thanks again for joining me!

I’ll leave you with this sparkly close up of one of my Christmas Cards and I’ll see you here next week.

Amy ⭐