The Robot
One human, one machine, thousands of perfect strokes.
The plotter is a custom-built drawing machine: a 1.2 × 1.8 meter gantry, hand-tuned firmware, and pen holders machined for real acrylic markers instead of fineliners. It took four rebuilds to get here. This page is the story of the machine and how a painting actually gets made.
The build
From kitchen table to gallery wall
Version one was aluminum extrusion clamped to a kitchen table, dragging a ballpoint through pizza-box cardboard. It proved one thing: a machine could hold a line longer than my arm could — and that was the whole idea worth chasing.
Versions two and three solved speed and slop. Belt tension, motor resonance, pen pressure — every wobble in the hardware shows up in the line. The current gantry accelerates the way a hand does: fast through the middle of a stroke, gentle at both ends, so ink lays down evenly across strokes over a meter long.
Version four — the machine working today — added the five-pen carousel and the firmware that makes thirty-hour plots survivable: cure-window scheduling, ink-flow monitoring, and a resume system for the one thing you can't engineer away, which is a power cut at hour twenty-nine.
The process
How a painting is made
01
A system, not a sketch
Every piece starts as code: a flow field, a wave system, a growth simulation. I tune parameters for days — sometimes weeks — rendering thousands of candidates on screen until one earns paper.
02
Toolpath solving
The chosen system is compiled into strokes the machine can physically draw: pen order, cure windows so wet lines never cross, travel optimization. A long plot is solved like a puzzle before the pen ever moves.
03
The plot
The gantry draws for hours — six, fourteen, thirty-one. Real acrylic pens on heavy cotton paper, strokes up to a meter and a half long. I swap pens, watch ink flow, and abort the sheet if anything drifts.
04
Sign, retire, ship
Finished pieces are signed by the human half of the collaboration. When an original sells, its seed and toolpath are retired forever — the machine could redraw it; it never gets the chance.
Materials
What the work is made of
- Paper
- 300–640gsm cotton rag, cold-press. Heavy enough to take acrylic ink without cockling over a 30-hour plot.
- Pens
- Acrylic paint markers in five studio colors — electric blue, magenta, chartreuse, orange, violet — chosen for lightfastness.
- Machine
- Custom 1.2 × 1.8 m CoreXY gantry, hand-tuned firmware, five-pen carousel, sub-millimeter repeatability.
- Software
- Studio-written generative systems and a toolpath compiler that schedules every stroke around ink cure windows.
Watch
The robot at work
Time-lapses and studio clips. Follow on YouTube and TikTok for every new plot.
Video embeds appear here once IDs are added to src/config/site.ts (embeds.youtubeVideoIds / embeds.tiktokVideoIds). In the meantime, the channels are live:
Own a piece of the collaboration
Every available original and print edition is in the shop. Commissions are open too — the robot takes requests, through me.