Research and Inspiration
Again alot of the inspiration for the last two assignments has come from the first day of class where we were introduced to several artists that have incorporated a plotter into their artistic process. Tyler Hobbs work has stood out to me in particular and I want to start to emulate some of his work. However, I’m not sure how many of his creations are generated by code rather than vector images he has designed himself. That is something I will need to discover as I continue to fall down the rabbit hole that is his Instagram feed.
For the final plots, which you can see further down the page, I wanted to use some of the Processing Sketches provided to take advantage of the noise elements already incorported into that code. However, I also wanted to code something on my own from scratch so you can see the plot with the circle cutout in the middle is all code that I wrote. The Print10 element is based on an Open Processing sketch that I wrote as an adaptation to the original.
Process and Progress
Above are the plotter-ready images we created for class. It was a great exercise to create and prep all these different designs. It allowed me to see what goes into each type of design and where the complex ones can become a hassle.
There was a lot of learning to be had when I actually was with the plotter by myself. I did my first print successfully so I decided to fiddle with some of the settings in GraphTec Studio just to get more of an understanding of the process. The two settings I played with were the speed and the pressure. I wanted to get some more defined lines so I turned the speed down to 15 cm/s and was happy with the results however I did not expect the time difference to increase that much. In messing with that setting I now understand that if I want to get a plot that is more defined I need to budget more time. Needless to say 20 cm/s was more than enough for these relatively simple first plots. When I adjusted the pressure setting I went from 2 up to 4 just to see and found out that, in this case, there is no need for the increased amount of pressure.
Most of my time was spent in Affinity Designer cleaning up the files so that the plotter and GraphTec would like them. The doubling of vector images after using the Divide command became rather frustrating but I can say that I’ve certainly added more hours in Affinity Designer which is a plus as well. Also, know that I’ve messed with some of the preferences it is starting to behave in a manner that I am accustomed to.
I plotted my images on Friday and ended up using 4 of the time slots, 2 of which were spent on the one design that I turned the speed way down on. It came out great but I think it still would have been OK had I used the default settings discussed in class.
Reflection
In the end I was succesful with my first solo plotting assignment and I see the practically limitless potential for creating with this tool. The process of translation is a complete and total slog when I’m bringing in code generated vector images and I really wish there was a better tool for cutting everything and making sure there are no duplicate vectors. I had a much easier time when I used simple vector images that I created in Affinity Designer. This process produces less complex images but it vastly reduces the hastle of the translation process.
Regardless of the difficulty presented by translation I know that I will use this tool to bring my digital creations into the physical space and I’m excited to see how those creations progress through this quarter and beyond.