Spent some of the day plotting more cards for the Patreon peeps, using a bit of maths to 'blend' from one set of colours to the next, turning each one of these into nine colour pen plots, which is... a lot, and had me wishing I had an automatic pen changer
I went into the studio today to work on my online shop. In theory I could work on it anywhere, but I like to have all the things I want to put into the shop on hand so I can test going through the process of photographing them, and adding them to the system. Because each time I discover some new edge case I have to fix. When I arrived I saw that Kris had been in yesterday, 'cause I spotted these.…
As the most recent Drawing Machine 101 video was about randomness, which included when to draw these lines - I've been plotting a bunch for the Patreon members. They're very simple, but I love how the colours work together.
These are still waiting until after last frost to go outside.
Well, good news, it turns on!! And that's as far as we've gotten with it.
Got some new shelves for outside the greenhouse as the seedlings are being moved back and forth, in and out, in earnest now.
FUCK OFF SPARROWS
Sparrows keep nibbling the growing veg, in theory this will either stop them, or give them something interesting to look at.
Okay, so this thing turned up in the studio. It's a 3d clay printer, which reads GCODE, so I'm thinking I can turn all my GCODE pen plotting skills into clay pots 😁
Went to London, took some snaps, got super tired!
Made a video about random number, and picked some of my favourites (between 0 and 1).
I'm enjoying being in the greenhouse, surrounded by plants.
Trying to set up some colour calibration in the studio. I have a fairly good lighting set-up, which is pretty consistent, what I'd really like is a couple of profiles I can just apply to colour correct any "product shots" I take of prints for the online shop. tbh though it's turning out to be a totally pita. And I've very happy to settle with good-enough. I know everyone's monitors and screens are…
Cut the business card up back at my studio.
I have a new company, DEEP KEEP LTD - which is all about helping people to archive, well, stuff. Still early days, but needed a business card, and what better to use than the Riso printer? Well, actually LOTS of things better to use 'cause Riso smudges like a mofo, but it was a heck of a lot of fun. This should probably be in the Life and Studio section 😁
Bought a whole bunch of 3d glasses, so when I send these 3d plots to the Patreon members they'll actually be able to see them in 3d.
Refined the 3d plotting a bit more and switched up the pen to something that shows up a lot better.
Got some more flowers in there, straight from the garden centre, as the ones I'm growing in the greenhouse are still nowhere near ready.
More shots from the garden. Since I last uploaded here I've dug out a bed around the middle circle. Next step is to fill it with flowers.
I got thinking, that if I could output a single SVG file of a view across the landscape, I should be able to shift the "camera" to the left and right of that point and get a stereo pair of SVG files. A quick bit of plotting later and some 3d glasses and here we go.
Did another print of a The Sentinel landscape. The enemies are still in the wrong place with this one. Alignment is still off on this one, which is very much a Riso thing.
Plotted out another 48 frame animation, where each frame is 16:9 ratio. Not sure when I'll have time to photograph this one to turn it into an animation.
Four pages of plots, 64 frames in total. The timelapse worked out pretty well. I didn't bother cutting these up into individual frames as the paper was pretty flimsy and not really good for anything. And I also had the plotter drawing on to card too, which would be worth cutting up.
I said I wasn't going to grow vegetables, only flowers for ink. And yet here we are, one of two courgette seedlings.
The blossom doesn't last long.
As I had the Sentinel landscape generator working I made it save out png views as well as the SVGs. Actually for fun it can create both PNG and SVG of the same view. The tree and enemy algorithm is slightly wrong here, so while the landscape is correct, the placement of the objects is a bit off. I think I know what the problem is and will change it in a few days time when I get the chance.
Trying a new design with the brush pen holders. This time giving them a slightly tapered and then faceted end. Practically to make them drop into the base easier, but also to make them look more gem like.
More of the Sentinel plots, this time I have the code generating a number of frames that are then plotted, with an eye to stringing them all together as an animation.
A few days ago Mark released an annotated version of the BBC Micro source code for the game The Sentinel, a game that's fascinated me since I first played it years ago (1986). I'd often thought about trying to recreate the landscape algorithm but a false assumption/memory about how the landscape worked had always thrown me off. Seeing the new code allowed me to see that I'd been mistaken and…
Quick one this; spent the day working from Swan Hill Studios, upstairs 'cause there was something going on downstairs. I just liked the lighting for this shot, which was also part of my photo365 project.
Worked on a second revision of the brush pen holders. Trying to work out if I want the inner lip of the hole to be sharp or rounded. They're looking pretty good though.
As I was using the brush pens a lot more and they kept getting in the way I figured I could make a pen holder like I did for the TWSBI pens. And I wanted to try something based on the "Hexagones" [sic] project, something that was configurable. Which led to a hex base with pen holders of various lengths that could be slotted into it. Worked pretty well.
Now it's started to get warmer I've been moving the plants in and out the greenhouse to get some of them 'hardened-off'. Everything is still frosty in the morning and guess will continue to be for the next couple of months.
LAMY have come out with a new rollerball pen that takes the ink cartridges from their Safari line of fountain pens. They say it can only use the T10 Blue ink cartridges - but we'll see about that. I ran a test with one to see just how much it could draw on one full cartridge and it turns out easily over two sides of A1 - unless you were doing a very detailed plot it should be fine. While that was…
Had a go at making business cards for Aaaaaah Riso, which I like. I feel like I almost have the yellow skewing problem solved, but I guess only time will tell.
Go moving on the Drawing Machines 101 video, the first up was about 'Loops' - and in this case a While loop, one of the lesser spotted ones. I wanted to demonstrate a few different things you could do with just a simple loop and a bunch of straight lines, including placing objects under the paper, and moving the plotter around.
I've been meaning to try the brush code onto longer forms, think bookmark format I guess, or a banner/standard. The hex-grid I had defined for postcard was kinda hardcoded, so I abstracted out the logic so I could pass in any number of rows and columns for the dots and let the chance function wind a path along them. Now it can do these nice long brush-strokes. I'm not 100% behind the design and…
Cut up the cards for the Patreon members today, packaged them up and got them sent off. Very satisfying!
Adjusted the code to handle fitting one size of paper inside another size of paper. By which I mean (with this design), I could say "hey, here's an A6 bit of paper with 8mm margins", or "here's an A2 sheet with 30mm margins" and it'd fill that space with these marks. But now I can go "here's an A2 sheet with 30mm margins, fill it with A6 designs each with 8mm margins". Which isn't groundbreaking I…
I am pretty much besides myself with joy! This is definitely what I had in mind when I was thinking about mark making. Recap, with these brush pens I can inject a small amount of ink into the reservoir just above the brush. There isn't enough ink to cover the whole page so it needs topping up. I rewrote the code to add pauses every 100 brush strokes or so, the machine waits for me to remove the…
The circles still weren't quite what I wanted to do, which was fill up a page. Back to the original tally code and LOTS of smaller tally marks on a sheet. I think around 1,404 of them in total on an A3 sheet. In this case, while some lines are denser than others the whole thing didn't actually run out of ink. Noted: smaller marks, even though there are more of them = not running out of ink as…
After the previous mark making brush code I wanted to go bigger. I wanted to see how many brushstrokes I could make before the ink ran out, or dried up. Making the tiny marks is fine, but I had this feeling that I wanted to fill a large sheet in marks just to see what happened. I didn't do that right away, I just scaled up the circle code as a first pass at seeing how many marks I could make. The…
Back in the studio today. For the past few prints I've noticed there's been an alignment problem, and I thought it was the pink drum. If the alignment was off a bit up, down, left or right I could easily adjust for that, but in this case it's skewed, which is harder to deal with. Today I make a checkerboard pattern and printed yellow, pink, red and green, each one with each other. Turns out it's…
Gotta stop the plants getting used to the luxury of the greenhouse, so they got turfed out this morning to spend the day outside. Apparently this is the 'hardening off' process. It's still too cold for them to stay out over night; there's always the chance of frost for a few more weeks. Well, this is what a handful of YouTube videos tell me I should be doing anyway, and who am I to argue?! End of…
Had to spend an extra couple of hours this morning sorting out all the extra bulbs and plants from the garden centre. I don't think I'll be able to fit any more in here... unless, hanging baskets.
Doing a little more with the mark making brush work. One of them in two colours yellow-ish & purple, and then a second one making the brush lower down more for wider marks.
Went to the garden center and bought far too many things, so I spent the day figuring out a) what to do with it all and b) where to put it.
I particularly like this one, which happened because the plot before this had the brush height set wrong, so it scrunched the brush down into the paper splaying the bristles a bit. So with this next plot, instead of having one neat brush tip there's a slightly different effect. Next step is figuring out how to make it repeatable.
As we still won't have gotten to actual code for the DM101 videos, we're still in the introduction stage, I have to create some extra pen plots this month for Patreon peeps. I'm going to be doing some variation on tally marks, in this case small strokes with the drawing machine, adjusting the height as it goes; basically setting the z-height of the start and end points differently. Getting some…
Can still get out in the morning early enough to need the fairy lights. But pretty soon they won't get turned on again until Autumn.