📙 #057 - Pastels and Apocalyptic Albums
Mainly pictures, some words a bit of music and other people's knitting machine videos.
Gorillasun’s latest newsletter, #93 All Things Dithering, reminded me of this video by Martin, “Modifying and Automating the Addi Knitting Machine for Multi-Color Knitting”…
Side note for those interested in having a YouTube channel; Martin currently has 10.2k subscribers and has published exactly one video, the one posted above.
And we can’t post that one without posting “You Wouldn’t Download a Knitting Machine”, which probably won’t embed in SubStack properly, but let’s give it a go…
…if you’re interested in an open source 3d printed knitting machine.
And why not just put this one on to relax.
# PASTELS IN THE ARTFRAME
A couple of weeks ago I talked about using the ArtFrame as a stamping machine, well, since then I’ve been putting pastels into it instead to see how that goes. Since the last newsletter I had to pop down to London for a week, which means I’ve only had a few days to play with this, so this will be more picture based than anything.
I started with Mungyo oil pastels on some nice rough designed-for-oil-pastels paper.
Which didn’t work as well as I expected, although tbh, I’m not really sure what I was expecting.
I know that a lot of working with oil pastels is applying pressure and using the edges, both things you could technically do with some faffing, but I really wanted to just try things out quick with minimal effort (go me!)
Next I thought I’d try some Caran d’Ache Neoart wax oil pastels, which worked so badly that I didn’t even take photos 😅
I should probably note a couple of things at this point;
One; my studio was very cold, and I expect if these oil pastels were in some nice toasty room things could be a little better, that’s an experiment for another time.
Two; even with the extra weight of the “heavy duty” ArtFrame pen holder (all the nuts on the bolt you can see in the photos), there wasn’t really enough downwards pressure. Which is easy to fix by adding even more weight to the pen holder, something I didn’t have time to do. But, I pressed on the whole thing with my finger a couple of times and the lines left were a lot better, and I know the lifter mechanism can lift a lot more, so perhaps it’s just a case of adding even more weight knowing the machine can handle it.
Then I switched over to Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle wax oil pastel (crayons), which have the main benefit of being pointy. As my code was designed with do three passes with each colour it allowed me to sharpen them (using a normal pencil sharpener) between each run.
A seperate thing I’ve just started playing with on the ArtFrame is you can set it to pause after every X meters of drawing. Currently I’m plotting an artwork with 170 meters of lines, and I’m telling it to pause after every 20 meters so I can sharpen the pencil. Something you can do in code anyway, but it’s a nice touch to have it built into the device, next test for that is POSCA pens.
The last thing I had a chance to try was soft pastels, which were both the best and worst (two tips for those in a moment).
They started off bad, by not having a huge amount of coverage…
…but, then it got good!! Or at least photogenic, as they started to crumble. The fun part about this is when other pastels came along and dragged those colourful crumbs all over the page.
At this point things were looking great, and a couple of people were asking me if I was going to fix all the crumbs (using, dunno, spray on pastel crumb fixer I assume), but I was more concerned with cleaning the drawing machine up, so I vacuumed everything up, at which point the final result looked more like this…
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s not as exciting to look at as when we had all the crumbs!
Anyway, a couple of things;
The thing holding the pastels is a Mungyo Soft Oil Pastels Holder (amazon link, sorry).
Someone suggested freezing the soft pastels before using them. Will that work, what will it do? No idea, but it sounds like fun.
I think with more experimenting and more downwards pressure we could get somewhere super interesting, but it was a fun few days trying things out.
# UNEASY LISTENING
For some reason I went back to listen to “Year Zero” by Nine Inch Nails, the video below is the first track in a playlist of the whole thing…
…released in 2007 it’s a concept album that “criticizes contemporary policies of the United States government by presenting a dystopian vision of the year 2022”, wikipedia has this to say…
The Year Zero story takes place in the United States in the year 2022; or "Year 0" according to the American government, being the year that America was reborn. The United States has suffered several major terrorist attacks, and in response the government has seized absolute control on the country and reverted to a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. The government maintains control of the populace through institutions such as the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano.
Spoiler: by the end a god/alien/entity comes down, decides that things have gone too far and destroys everything.
If that “music for coding” is a little on the nose I also threw on 666, by Aphrodite’s Child, and prog-rock double album from 1972…
…which is, ummmmm, *check’s notes*…
The central concept is a countercultural interpretation of the Book of Revelation, in which a circus show based on the apocalypse performs for an audience at the same time that the real apocalypse takes place outside the circus tent, and at the end the two merge into one.
Oh.
# THE END
No, not like that!
I think I may have given up with social media (yeah yeah, I know I’ve said this before), I’ve definitely ditched twitter, and bluesky seems to have taken a turn for the worse. The main thing though is I feel a lot better not using them, which is good enough for me.
Facebook is gone, but I’m in a love/hate relationship with Instagram, in that every time I decide to stop using it, I enjoy using it more ⁉️
Either way, this newsletter and YouTube (and zines) is where it’s mainly going to be going forwards, so good to have you around.
The next newsletter should be out on the 3rd of April, and will hopefully have some more rubber stamping stuff in it.
Love you all,
Dan
❤️