[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI
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Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI
Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-
plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself--drawings (with
some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even
used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-
engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects,
especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me.
The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in
anything specific, let me know. Cheers!
Author : stankot
Score : 104 points
Date : 2025-02-10 17:52 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (muffinman.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (muffinman.io)
| nmoya wrote:
| Amazing work! Thanks for sharing
| rossant wrote:
| Great outcome and write up, thanks for sharing!
| jimmcslim wrote:
| Curious to know what pen plotter was used here... didn't look
| like article mentioned it.
|
| I'm a big fan of Dan Catt and his work with generative art and
| pen plotting.
| jfim wrote:
| The author mentioned that the maker of their pen plotter is
| evil mad scientist, so it's likely they're using the AxiDraw
| stankot wrote:
| That is correct. I use AxiDraw SE/A3 and I love it. One of
| the best purchases I ever made.
| jfim wrote:
| Super cool and it looks fantastic!
|
| I've been wanting to do something with a plotter, thanks for the
| tip about center line tracing
| deepAIhunter wrote:
| Inspiring! Great work
| tobr wrote:
| Looks like a fun project. I would love to get into pen plotting
| someday.
|
| Have to say the text bothers and intrigues me... digital fonts
| that try to look like handwriting are already in the uncanny
| valley, and then you loop it back into physical media with a pen
| plotter. It could almost be an art project in its own right,
| exploring layers of going back and forth between physical and
| digital media to produce a seemingly mundane paper with some
| writing on it.
| stankot wrote:
| For me, pen plotting is a lot of fun. There is something so
| satisfying in bringing digital work to the physical world.
|
| As for the text, I have it on my todo list to create a few
| single line fonts, for some time now. The obvious one is my own
| handwriting, ideally with some randomness built in. I would
| like others to be less conventional to sprinkle them in my
| drawings, or like you mentioned, to create some pieces that are
| text only.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| I remember once seeing a presentation about someone making
| extensive use of ligatures to create a very realistic hand
| writing effect. I think it was that an "e", for example, would
| always look different depending on the preceding letter, even
| though it was not a real ligature case per say. It's a huge
| amount of work but I remember the results being very
| convincing.
| tobr wrote:
| Amy Goodchild has done some incredible work in this vein,
| involving pen plotters even.
| https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-
| jav...
| stankot wrote:
| This is awesome! I've seen it but forgot to bookmark it,
| thanks for sharing it again.
| bambax wrote:
| Excellent project, congrats!
|
| About the cleaning up phase: the author cleaned up the bitmaps
| before the vectorizing stage, and that included separating lines.
|
| In my experience it's a little bit easier to clean the vectorized
| results by removing unwanted points, because those are easier to
| see than line connections that may or may not pose a problem
| later. (But to each their own.)
| stankot wrote:
| Actually that's my usual approach, but you should see the
| vector output from these. I tried doing it and than went back
| to cleaning up the raster images.
| imranq wrote:
| Love it - I wonder if you could create a animation book this way
| cheaply, see a moving image as you flip through it
| aredox wrote:
| You're in luck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918902
| imranq wrote:
| Amazing, this is why I visit HN :D
|
| Combining the two ideas, "hand drawn" animation flip books
| could be neat. Start with a video, convert frames to a
| drawable vector, draw each frame with a pen plotter, assemble
| the flip book
| stankot wrote:
| Sure, I think the hard part is creating hand drawn animation.
| If you can draw or generate it, the rest is fairly straight
| forward.
|
| I have an idea for somewhat different flip animation, stay
| tuned :)
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