I really enjoyed looking through the DrawingBots server, in particular I enjoyed looking through the WIPs users posted and it made me contemplate a lot about the diversity of the crew making plotter art. I will not be including any images, in large part because I don’t find it appropriate to post someone else’s art from the server into a public post.
Observations:
1. Medium: It was rare to see a person use anything beside colored micron pens on white paper. There were a few that took advantage of inverse coloring. I really appreciate that many of the people in the community don’t necessarily come from the same background and I think its cool to note some of the general themes. Some people posted about hardware modifications or personal plotter designs, those WIPs were the ones I found most intriguing since it’s a domain so far from my own.
2. Hatching: I paid close attention to some lovely examples of hatching! Like sweetcorn previously mentioned, there is a tendency to stick to either spicy realism or super intense geometry in plotter art. Some of the more complex pieces of plotter art I observed fell into a mix of the two categories and what I really appreciated was the interesting patterns that were used for hatching (which seems to be the common trend in spicy realism).
One piece I particularly liked used voronoi diagrams, where the distance of each point was determined by the value and then these points were interpolated/randomized in a really weird way as to create a very nicely scribbled look to the drawing. The only reason I know voronoi was used was because I asked the person who made it. Very cool.
Another piece I liked used a very Van Gogh-esque field to define values and I noticed many others used complex geometric shapes at different points to create a value.
I feel like these responses often rely on highly mathematical properties to simulate real life, and I really respect that. But I also want them to maybe break it a little.