Category Archives: Art

Invisible Ink with AxiDraw

Joanie LeMercier has been working on a project using invisible ink and different lighting schemes with the AxiDraw. He has posted a bunch of clips and pictures in his twitter stream with the heading “Invisible drawing.”

Head over to the thread where you can see more progress shots as well as completed drawings.

CMYK Portraits with AxiDraw

Spongenuity has been posting some wonderful portraits made with AxiDraw on instagram, including some CMYK ones like the one below.

AxiDraw on t-shirts

We’ve seen a bunch of posts about using AxiDraw for fabric lately!

Fabric makers and sharpies are both making appearances.

Previously:

Wooden signs with AxiDraw

Jonathan sent in pictures of these wooden signs he made with his AxiDraw.

He shared some tips as well:

  • Put plastic wrap over the surface to test font, spacing, and size.
  • For polyurethane and lacquered finishes, if you make mistake with a permanent marker, write over your mistake with a dry erase marker and it comes right off.

It is awesome to see people taking advantage of AxiDraw’s ability to draw on different surface materials. Thank you, Jonathan!

Lemon Ginger Marmalade

It is lemon season here yet again! Given the quantity of fruit my Meyer lemon tree produces, I have many opportunities to remake my marmalade recipes with little adjustments and changes. This time, I added ginger. Quite a bit of ginger. This jam has a bright cheerful flavor with a bit of zing to it which is perfect for the rainy weather we’ve been having.

Ingredients:

  • 8 cups (Meyer) lemon pieces
  • 1 cup lemon juice
  • 1 cup water
  • 3 Tbsp grated ginger
  • 2/3 cup ginger matchsticks
  • 6 cups sugar

First cut up the lemons into small pieces and remove any obvious seeds. After juicing lemons, we’ve found that straining it through a julep strainer holds back the seeds but allows most of the pulp through.

Our favorite tool for grating ginger is a fine microplane. For making matchsticks, a mandoline slicer makes short work of it.

Put the lemon pieces, lemon juice, water, grated ginger, and ginger matchsticks in a pot and simmer until the lemons start to soften. Add the sugar. Stir regularly and cook to the desired consistency. To test consistency, put a spoonful on a plate in the fridge. If it’s too runny after cooling for a few minutes, keep simmering and test again after a few minutes.

Makes about four pints. If you want to can it for longer storage, Ball has a nice introduction to canning on their website.


Other fruit preserves from the Play with your food archives:

Tap List with AxiDraw

The folks at Sac City Brews use an AxiDraw to create their tap list. The AxiDraw plots out the beer name, info and logo onto a piece of acrylic which gets mounted in the tap list above the bar.

Best of all, they’ve mounted the AxiDraw in plain view, so patrons can see it getting ready for the next beer to go on tap. (You can see video of it in action in their Yelp pictures.)

If you’re in Sacramento and are looking to try out a new tap house, check them out. Thank you to Todd for sending us the pictures!

Evil Mad Scientist Valentines: 2018

2018 valentines

Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our sixth year, and sixth set of cards: The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love, and last year’s set featured atomic orbitals, exponential growth, and an epsilon delta declaration of love.

This year’s set features parallel lines, friction, and activation energy:

My love for you is at a stable equilibrium and therefore resistant to external perturbations

What could be more romantic than telling someone that the second derivative of your potential energy is at its minimum when you’re around them?

I'll Never be NP Complete Without You

The perfect card to give to any computer scientist when you want them to both (A) appreciate being given a valentine and (B) secretly wonder whether you don’t quite understand what np completeness means, or whether you do but thought it was funny.

Parallel lines never meet. But we should.

Parallel lines never meet. But we should.

It takes a special person to overcome my activation energy to send this card to you and ask if you will be my  valentine.

For when you have chemistry with someone.

Let's  measure our coefficient of kinetic friction

Why measure? Because it’s generally considered impolite to ask someone what their normal force is.


2018 valentines

You can download the full set here, which includes all 36 designs from all six years (a 1.6 MB PDF document).

As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.


Update: New cards have been released! Please check out the 2019 set, which contains all 42 cards from 2013 through 2019.

AxiDraw, JavaScript, and Generative Art

Matt DesLauriers published a two-part blog post, Pen Plotter Art & Algorithms exploring his JavaScript workflow with AxiDraw and generative art.

Unlike a typical printer, a plotter produces prints with a strangely human quality: occasional imperfections arise as the pen catches an edge or momentarily dries up, and the quality of the ink has the subtle texture and emboss that you normally only see in an original drawing.

He has also posted his source code on github for the articles.

Part 1 covers getting started and explores Delaunay triangulation. Part 2 delves deeper into developing algorithms.

Plotter Portraits

Plotter art portrait drawn by Jojo the robot

A couple of creative artists, Makio&Floz, are offering custom plotted portraits, drawn by their AxiDraw, playfully named Jojo the robot.

Makio&Floz is a duo working on digital based projects. Without limiting themselves to a virtual space or a physical one, their goal is to explore design and generative art using code as a pencil.

You can upload a photo, preview the “Plottrait”, and order your own custom generative art piece.

Plotter portrait in progress