Adventures with a plotter

These works are my early experiments with the UUNA TEK 1824 ArtStation pen plotter. I’m still refining the tools and techniques behind the process but it’s really exciting that each time I try something new I immediately think of even more approaches I want to try out! I’ve included some example pieces below that give an idea of the different directions I’m trying out.

The Walls You Can’t See

This piece is an experiment with black ink on black paper to create maze walls which are seen by sheen rather than colour. The piece only reveals itself as you look closer, and changes based on the viewing angle. I really like the idea of mazes where the solution is obvious and the walls are not!

The black walls are plotted in black fine-liner and the gold lines are plotted in gold metallic gel pen. The walls have been drawn square-edged and regular, and the solution has been smoothed to give a more organic effect.

So Close To An Answer

Where the first piece hid all the walls this time I instead wanted to play with showing part of the solution. The gold rays show the general direction, but of course don’t meaningfully help you find it! Similarly the golden walled sections do contain the solution… in there somewhere.

The black walls are plotted in black fine-liner and the gold lines are plotted in gold metallic gel pen.

Australian Grasses

Alongside my laser-cut pieces based on Australian botanicals I wanted to explore the many distinctive sculptural Australian grasses. This piece is built from detailed silhouettes of individual grass species layered and combined together in custom software tools into a larger composition.

The piece contains over 300m of lines and took approximately 5 hours to plot. The UUNA TEK ArtStation 1824 did a great job of powering through it all!

It is plotted using a TWSBI Eco (medium nib) and used almost a the full reservoir of Pilot Iroshizuku shin-ryoku ink (and TWSBI Eco reservoirs are big compared to most fountain pens / cartridges).

Wind Blown Field

After the precise geometry of my earlier plots I wanted to experiment more with using the lines themselves more expressively. I created this composition using directional lines to depict a wind-blown Australian field.

The piece contains over 300m of lines and took approximately 8 hours to plot due to having so many small segments. Again the ArtStation 1824 did a great job of knuckling under and putting the ink down.

It is plotted using a TWSBI Eco (fine nib) and used about half of a full reservoir of the TWSBI black ink.

Australian Botanicals… In Maximum Colour!

While producing laser drawing versions of some Australian botanicals I realised that I quite liked the way that the laser control software had split out the layers into bright contrasting colours.

I decided to replicate them using Sharpie water-based brush tip acrylic markers on grey card stock. On the left is gum flowers and nuts, and on the right there is a composition of grevilleas. Both plants are actually very colourful in real life, though nothing like these plots!

There’s only a few meters of lines in these but I was careful to allow a lot of drying time between layers to avoid smudging.