Gotta play with my new toy:

Spirograph – liquid ink – ceramic tip

That’s with a set of liquid ink and ceramic tip plotter pens. They’re unbelievably cranky, but produce wonderfully fine lines:

Spirograph – liquid ink pen – detail

Text comes out exactly the way vector lettering should look:

Spirograph – liquid ink pen text – detail

There’s a slight shake visible at 500 mm/min = 8.3 mm/s, but it’s Good Enough.

All the pen-and-ink traffic around the center produced a ring of damp green fuzz:

Spirograph – liquid ink – ceramic tip – center detail

The artsy part of the plot ran at 1800 mm/min = 30 mm/s, with little of the wobbulation at 6000 mm/min = 100 mm/s. None of that would matter with a router, of course.

It’s a nice, Christmasy design in kinda-red and sorta-green.

From the stack of plots accumulating near the MPCNC bench:

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Plots 7 and 9 show the tape sutures required to produce a 26×18 inch sheet covering the MPCNC’s full work area. The squat plots fit on B-size sheets and the rest come from 17×14 inch artist’s sketchpad sheets.

I used Google PhotoScan to capture and rectangularize paper sheets from the floor or atop the bench, then battered the contrast and crushed the file size with a one-liner:

i=1 ; for f in 1* ; do printf -v dn "Spiro %02d.jpg" $(( i++ )) ; convert $f -level '10,80%' -density 300 -define jpeg:extent=300KB tweaked/"$dn" ; done

The plots look great in person (modulo some incremental software improvements), but the slideshow images look awful because:

• Google PhotoScan produces surprisingly low-res images
• I’m overly compressing the results

They’re not (yet) art and there’s no point in a high-quality workflow.

Enjoy the day …