Category Archives: Art

Using the WaterColorBot to teach programming

Water color painting titled Ocean Woman
JR has been volunteering in a high school programming class and wrote up a thoughtful post about his experiences using the WaterColorBot in the classroom. He wrote a Python library that allows users to directly control a WaterColorBot by writing Python code.

To be honest, this library is a pretty insane way to control the bot. It’s needlessly low-level: you’re manually controlling the brush’s position, you’ve got to remember to wash and re-ink the brush every so often, etc. If your main goal is to just get the bot to paint a pretty picture, there are lots of better ways to go about it.

As a teaching aid, though, it’s been a total success, because it lets students flex their burgeoning Python skills and actually make a real thing in the process! We’ve been blown away by the stuff our students have created.

He has also documented and shared his code on github.

AxiDraw on Stage

In unusual uses for our drawing machines, AxiDraw is playing the role of the master of ceremony in Joël Maillard’s play “Last sheet (after the big lack)”, a production about the robotic future being put on by Theater Marie in Switzerland.

Happy Halloween!

Paintings of skulls made by WaterColorBot

I also thought you might enjoy seeing the design we were running today in the classroom…

Spencer Yonker sent in these skull paintings made by WaterColorBot in the classroom.

Halloween!

And we had a customer stop in the shop to show off his red velvet skull, with added flickering LED eyes.

Thanks to both of you for sharing your Halloween spirit with us! And Happy Halloween!

AxiDraw and TouchDesigner

We’ve noticed a few artists on twitter and instagram using TouchDesigner as a tool in their workflow toward creating output with AxiDraw.


David Braun has been posting beautiful, and sometimes mindbending artwork on twitter.


Chris Hall posted this piece using sound waves to create scenes.

Some like it plot . . . . . #inktober #axidraw #touchdesigner

A post shared by Hard Work Party (@hardworkparty) on


Noah Norman has been posting geometric plotting videos.

#axidraw #touchdesigner

A post shared by Matthew Ragan (@raganmd) on


Matthew Ragan has been taking advantage AxiDraw’s ability to draw on just about anything, and plotting over already printed materials. He also has published his tools on github for getting vectors out of TouchDesign. He describes it as:

A pipeline for handling the SOP to SVG pipeline. This is especially handy for using procedurally generated geometry for paths to be cut or plotted.

We’ve added a link to his repository on the AxiDraw documentation wiki. We love it when folks share their tools and would love to hear what tools and processes people are using or creating for working with our plotters.

Electronic Kintsugi

Vanessa Julia Carpenter from FabLabRUC did a workshop at FabCafe Tokyo with Kintsugi Artist Kurosawa using mended dishes as conductors in circuits.

The precious metals used to repair the dishes are used to trigger sound or light, encouraging the participants to connect with the dishes in interesting ways. There’s much more detail on this intersection of craft and electronics over in Vanessa’s post about the workshop.

Signal Generator Musical Instrument

Our friend Arjan van der Meij made this charming musical instrument from a signal generator, a servo motor, an Arduino and a processing program. He wrote an instructable for it so you can build one, too.

Signal Generator Instrument

He also wrote about his experience with the project in Dutch on makered.nl. Projects like this one, that started with a question (“Why don’t you build a machine to do it?”) are great for learning new skills. I often get asked what things someone should get for learning electronics, and my answer is usually that the first thing you need is a project that you want to make so that you’ll have motivation to research what you’ll need.

3d printed knob adapter connected to servo motor and signal generator

Arjan wanted to learn tinkercad, and used this project toward that goal by modeling the knob adapter he’d need for connecting his servo to his signal generator knob. Even if you don’t want to make a musical instrument from a signal generator, this project may provide inspiration for trying out new techniques.

Fractals with AxiDraw

Paul Butler wrote a tutorial on Fractal Generation with L-Systems and posted some example code with the output plotted by AxiDraw.

Fractal tree drawn by AxiDraw

The tutorial is also available as a Jupyter notebook with runnable code.