[HN Gopher] So what's the difference between plotted and printed...
___________________________________________________________________
So what's the difference between plotted and printed artwork?
Author : cosiiine
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-08-13 13:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lostpixels.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (lostpixels.io)
| donatj wrote:
| My dad worked for Control Data in the 1980s and talks about
| hiding designs in period characters on his schematics. Talks
| about how the plotters would get to the period, hang out for a
| while and then continue.
| futurecat wrote:
| As a plotter artist also, I'm super happy to see this article on
| HN.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Printers using CMYK isn't strictly true, right? Aren't you able
| to choose the ink colors when getting prints professionally made?
| cosiiine wrote:
| You're correct, there are some more sophisticated processes
| used by specialty printers such as CcMmYK
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcMmYK_color_model). Something
| like this will use more inks and less halftones, giving better
| results in some cases.
|
| Or are you referring to other printing methods, say for example
| silk screening? There, you would definitely select a specific
| ink to use. It just depends on what your goals are.
| mcphage wrote:
| Or they could be referring to Spot Color.
| lotyrin wrote:
| One of my favorites is spot gloss.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| Yes, giclee printers typically have ten or more inks, and
| Risograph printers offer a wider but limited set of options.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "giclee" is just a neologism that means "I will charge my
| customers more to recoup the capital cost of this large
| inkjet printer" and doesn't really have any inherent meaning
| as to the number of inks.
| exasperaited wrote:
| Yes. With a limited carve-out for anyone still running an
| Iris, who originated that neologism in a much more
| sceptical market.
| alt227 wrote:
| At work we have CMYKW printers, which add an extra channel of
| white ink to the mix.
| cubefox wrote:
| To print on non-white paper? But I think then the ordinary
| cyan, magenta and yellow inks can't be used. Normally those
| are translucent in order to create red, green and blue via
| subtractive color mixing. E.g. overlaying yellow and magenta
| dots creates a red dot.
|
| But if the paper can't be assumed to be white, CMY need to be
| opaque, otherwise yellow on black paper would just look
| black. Then you can no longer create red, green and blue. So
| you need additional red, green and blue pigment, likewise
| opaque. So "CMYRGBKW". Then the other colors can be mixed via
| dithering the eight base colors as usual.
|
| Or maybe your printer still needs white paper, and the white
| pigment has some other use?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I have a Canon Pixma Pro 100 and it uses 8 different inks. The
| "Pro" really means professional. When used with the correct
| paper, it produces the same high quality prints as any
| professional service.
|
| Looking at the artwork on my wall, there's two big things that
| set prints apart from an original artwork. 1. Computer software
| doesn't capture the imperfection of a physical medium. 2.
| Printers can't reproduce the texture of layered colors.
| vl wrote:
| I wonder how much does it cost per full color letter-size
| print? How often do you need to clean nozzles (and how much
| ink is spent)?
|
| I have Epson EcoTank, which is great since I can refill it
| from the ink bottles (even non-Epson), but since it gets only
| occasional use for color printing, almost every time I have
| to clean nozzles before printing in color.
| azornathogron wrote:
| I had a summer job working at a print software company and they
| had a large format printer with, if I remember correctly, 12
| different ink colours. These weren't spot colours - though
| that's also an example of going outside CMYK - but meant the
| printer supported a very wide colour gamut and subtle colour
| grading.
|
| Anyway, yes, professional printing can go beyond just CMYK in
| various ways.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I love plotter art and have dabbled a bit myself. The really fun
| part is how pen-on-paper is not completely reliable or a perfect
| line. You get a little texture if the pen skips. You can use
| watercolor pens that bleed. You can get crazy with something like
| Copic markers on Yupo paper so the whole thing stays wet and
| smears for minutes. It's part of the art.
|
| This bit from the article made me laugh ruefully though: "it's as
| simple as buying some black paper and a white gel pen." You can
| get some beautiful effects with white ink on black paper but it
| is notoriously difficult to get looking good. White ink is tricky
| stuff. But that's part of the fun!
| mattdesl wrote:
| A lot of it comes down to which pens you happen to have - I've
| had some success with Sakura gelly rolls for white, and also
| more recently have been enjoying sharpie creative acrylic
| markers which has a moderately opaque white ink. I've also had
| some really frustrating experiences with some other pens and
| instruments!
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| JetPens has been an invaluable resource for learning about
| and buying pens. Their blog is great:
| https://www.jetpens.com/blog
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| I always thought of plotters as legacy tech, but considering the
| variety of marking tools you can attach to the head, I'm
| wondering if I should get one.
|
| Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Cricuts (and similar cutters, and multi-mode tools like the
| Xtool M1 and Bambu Lab H2D) have pen attachments
| exasperaited wrote:
| Yes. But no geek should be getting a Cricut when the
| Silhouette machines exist and are not so locked down and
| cloud encumbered.
|
| ETA: I guess a true maths geek nerd artist would probably
| want something more modular and larger anyway, but the
| Silhouette machines are varied, interesting, support a pretty
| well documented protocol (GPGL, a variant of/alternative to
| HPGL I think) and are supported in Inkscape and Python.
| mankyd wrote:
| Seconded. My Silhouette is great. I even emailed them and
| received a copy of the GPGL docs one time. It wasn't full
| on support, but they were willing to give me a start.
|
| The first thing I programmed was having it draw a hilbert
| curve and it worked great!
| exasperaited wrote:
| Ooh, did you do a blog article about it perhaps? I think
| I read it, if so.
| mankyd wrote:
| It's 14 years old at this point, but here you go:
| https://www.ohthehugemanatee.net/2011/07/gpgl-reference-
| cour...
| exasperaited wrote:
| Yep that's the one. Thank you for it. :-)
| buffet_overflow wrote:
| I made one for roughly $100 USD from an Arduino, steel rods,
| some stepper motors, and some 3D printed parts.
|
| Having an existing 3d printer is a bit "draw the rest of the
| owl" for this, but being able to extend and modify a device
| like a pen plotter is pretty nice.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| You can also pick up used older printers (like the Ender 3)
| secondhand VERY cheap and convert them.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But wouldn't you need to have the plotter working to draw the
| rest of that owl? so it seems like a chicken and egg
| situation as well
| exasperaited wrote:
| You could find a Silhouette Portrait 2 on eBay pretty cheaply.
| It has a reasonable range of tools, python and inkscape support
| and a reasonable, documented protocol.
| acomjean wrote:
| I thought "evil mad science" had an inexpensive one. Including
| one the would pen plot on eggs. (Not available)
|
| https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/171
|
| And a 2d minimalist plotter.
|
| https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846
|
| They seem to have been bought. Those pro plotters look nice
| though quite pricy. The page still has good resources.
|
| https://www.evilmadscientist.com/
| omoikane wrote:
| A lot of people design and build their own custom pen plotters,
| with varying level of precision:
|
| https://note.com/penplotter/n/n4fdf6959738a
|
| The page is in Japanese, but you can get a feel of things
| through the embedded videos. One of them links to this
| instructables page in English:
|
| https://www.instructables.com/Mini-Plotter-V2/
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Not legacy at all. Think construction/cabinetry plans etc.
| Plotters are not inexpensive unless you build one.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| AxiDraw from Evil Mad Scientist was what a lot of us were
| buying a few years ago. He's now part of Bantam Tools and is
| making a thing called the NextDraw. Same design but better
| built and a lot more expensive.
| https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw
|
| There's a world of cheaper unbranded Chinese plotters that
| folks are using that seem to work well. Quality does matter,
| you want something very precise and stable.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Looks like the Bantam Tools ones start at just under a
| thousand. How much were the AxiDraw units originally?
| Jyaif wrote:
| The LY Drawbot on Aliexpress is around $110 USD and it's quite
| good.
| spauldo wrote:
| We've got a couple at the engineering/automation company I work
| for. They're huge, probably 8 feet long at least. No idea what
| they were used for - they belonged to the engineering group.
| Unfortunately I can't ask because they all quit.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Large-scale stuff like blueprints is the obvious explanation,
| but the largest plotter I've ever personally seen was owned
| by an oil exploration company and used to graph their seismic
| test results. Only about 5 feet wide (just over 1.5 m),
| though.
| xnx wrote:
| Classic plotter art as performance art video:
| https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_schachter_how_i_turned_frus...
|
| After rewatching that, I did a one-shot remake in p5js:
| https://g.co/gemini/share/b983a93e3ae2
|
| Is there actual plotter simulation software I could be using?
| romellogoodman wrote:
| Im on my second Bantam tools next draw and love it. Having made a
| similar transition from generative art to printmaking with a
| risograph and drawing with a pen plotter; I love the slow
| physical process of using them.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| For whit inks how about uv printers?
| cluckindan wrote:
| For plotters, just get a pen with UV ink. Is a UV printer
| something more fancy?
| Karliss wrote:
| Those are two completely different things. Nothing to do with
| UV fluorescent inks. UV printers use special inks which are
| cured by UV light instead of relying on solvent evaporation
| like most inks. A bit similar to UV cured resins used by SLA
| printers or UV cured glues. This makes it easier to print on
| various materials like metal, glass, and ceramics. UV
| printing can be done in multiple layers to add 3d texture or
| using bottom white layer as primer thus providing better
| colors regardless of base material color.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Great article. I've only ever came across plotters used for tech
| drawings cad cam archtecture but i hadnt considered them applied
| to artistic output. Well done makes me want one now.
| jwong_ wrote:
| I have a really cheap one that seems to apply uneven pressure
| across the bed. Has anyone worked with any sort of spring loaded
| holder that could help that sort of problem?
| futurecat wrote:
| I'm having the same issue. Which model do you have?
| jwong_ wrote:
| Mine is an ultra cheap "hand writing" machine off taobao.
| There's not really any specific model since there's a million
| clones of them floating around
|
| I'll probably have to make the holder myself but good to know
| others have had the same problem!
| stevetron wrote:
| I used to have an Epson Hi-80 plotter someone gifted me. Somebody
| else gifted it to themselves, so I never had a chance to play
| with it. But it had a centronics interface and could be set to
| emulate an Epson RX-80 dor matric printer. Never considered it
| for printing text, but why couldn't it with Epson emulation?
| acomjean wrote:
| >The keyword here, though, is reproduction. A printer isn't
| capable of mixing pigments the same way an artist mixes paints on
| a palette.
|
| This is kinda no longer true. Computer tools such as "krita"
| (open source) do an exceptional job emulating paints and brushes.
| A lot of professional illustrations now days are done digitally
| and printed. "Art" less so but the tablets keep getting better.
|
| https://krita.org/en/
|
| As someone who was kinda adept at making black and white prints
| from negatives, I kind of miss some of the old tech (making
| prints was a little magical). But digital / ink jet can get you
| 90% of the darkroom much easier and has some serious advantages.
|
| I do applaud the effort and the fun factor here is real. Those
| pen plotters are neat and enough different to make this an
| interesting niche.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I still remember the old "CreataCard" machines. They were a lot
| of fun to use and watch. (They very much understood and leveraged
| the fact that the customer purchasing a greeting card is not the
| recipient; making it fun to watch and fun to give was a major
| selling point.)
| coldcode wrote:
| I only make art designed to be printed on 10-12 color large
| format inkjet printers. Making plotter art is not inherently
| better or worse that printing, it's just a different type of art.
| I love what people do with plotters, but I just prefer doing
| printed versions, since what I make is often not possible with a
| plotter, as I deal in pixels (up to 200+ megapixels), and
| plotters deal in vectors. It's like Photoshop vs Illustrator, the
| don't compete as much as specialize in different things.
| https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
| snoman wrote:
| I'm sure you know this but it took me entirely too long to
| really understand and feel the satisfaction of taking and
| printing my own photos.
|
| It's very accessible these days to have a finished piece of art
| that's all yours - even with little artistic ability.
| cosiiine wrote:
| Agreed 100%. It all comes down to the artists intentions, and
| plotters have many limitations. My hope for this article was to
| expose people to other options.
|
| Great portfolio of art btw, thanks for sharing!
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| I have a failed 1x1m cnc build due to a lack of rigidity. I'm in
| the process of rebuilding it as a wall mounted plotter in my
| office. I could spend all day watching it move
| m463 wrote:
| Reading this, I think of paper technology that has probably been
| lost.
|
| I remember using flatbed plotters with a "static-cling" button.
| (maybe HP?)
|
| you clicked the button out, put paper on the flatbed, then
| clicked the button in and a static charge sucked the paper down
| and held it in place.
|
| You would generate your plots using a language that could select
| various color pens, move to x1,y1, pen down, move to x2,y2, pen
| up, etc...
|
| I think better printers and then inkjets are what finally killed
| them off.
| TheGoodBarn wrote:
| I splurged on a iDraw H SE - A3/A2 earlier this year and have
| been coding / making birthday cards for friends and family all
| summer.
|
| I feel like I get asked a lot the same questions and I think this
| article describes it best. Like yes I could have just upgraded to
| a nicer printer, but there is something fun about the process of
| getting an artwork plotted that makes it fun for me.
|
| I need to upload some of my plots to share.
|
| ---
|
| On a similar note for others who want to get into this, there was
| a thread awhile back on "What is the 90% activity in your
| favorite hobby", for example sanding taking 90% of the time for
| woodworking. For pen plotting the 90-95% is the art side. Taking
| images, converting them into g-code either via SVG or other
| processes, or writing code to make generative art, that is the
| 90%.
|
| At the end of the day the pen plotting itself at the surface
| level is a projection of the effort taken to generate the art.
| Where it gets really exciting is the capabilities and unique
| aspect of the medium (like touching on white ink or watercolor)
| that create truly unique ways of presenting the art.
|
| --
|
| Some related subreddits:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/PlotterArt/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/PenPlotters/
| spauldo wrote:
| If sanding took even 10% of my time I'd give up the hobby.
| Fortunately my girlfriend loves that kind of mindless work and
| does all the finishing that's more than "slap some BLO on it
| and call it good."
| smokel wrote:
| Having worked extensively on large charcoal drawings using heavy
| etching paper, I've often imagined what it would be like if a
| proper robotic arm could take on the task. My own process
| involves compressed charcoal pencils, plenty of erasers, and
| various grades of sandpaper, really _working_ the surface of the
| paper. And watching out not to scratch or dimple the paper.
|
| Plotters are usually limited in how they can tilt the pen, and
| their force-feedback capabilities are quite primitive, if
| present. And if you've ever tried sharpening a compressed
| charcoal pencil to a fine point, you'll know how difficult that
| would be to automate.
|
| If I ever happen to find four spare years tucked away somewhere,
| I might just attempt to build such a system myself :/
|
| Edit: to get an idea of what is possible with this technique, see
| the work of Annie Murphy Robinson [1], who also hosts workshops.
|
| [1] https://anniemurphyrobinson.com/
| PeterCorless wrote:
| I remember doing plotter artwork at Professor Harry Holland's Art
| & the Computer Lab back in the 1980s. We could draw in 8 colors!
|
| They were also huge for architectural drawings.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-13 23:00 UTC)