[HN Gopher] Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting
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       Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 212 points
       Date   : 2024-06-13 05:14 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.amygoodchild.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.amygoodchild.com)
        
       | rdtsc wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
           | rdtsc wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
       | A drag knife setup might make the world of difference here, nice
       | little project though.
        
       | zem wrote:
       | that's a wonderfully creative idea!
        
       | Daub wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | Lovely work, brightened my morning :)
        
       | yboris wrote:
       | 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
        
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