📙 #084 - Art, links, pen holders, no Dark Forest and videos.

LOVE this icosahedron plotted by Dave Mawer, onto four layers of tracing paper. We’ve been seeing a lot* of animated plotter drawings recently, but this method of - I assume - using the z-axis to decide which layer of paper to plot onto adds another dimension.

You can see more of his work over on Instagram, go say “Hi”.

Meanwhile, LB ALLIX (IG) made this, and the sheer chunkiness of it makes me smile.

Tiny jam jars are great for adding weight to pens, but this custom 3d print is probably far more practical and allows you to adjust the weight by adding more or less nuts to the nut caddy.

The files are over here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7313939

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# VPYPE, BUT NICE

vpype is correctly self described as “the Swiss-Army-knife command-line tool for plotter vector graphics.” and will solve a lot of your pen plotting troubles, so it’s worth getting to grips with.

However, sometimes you just want to do the most common optimising tasks with little fuss.

Draw Scape (IG) - who has a lot of experience dealing with kind of thing - has you covered with a web tool that handles the most common use cases.

https://drawscape.io/resources/optimize

Also handy that it shows you the commands so you can (eventually) figure out how to do it yourself.

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# HEXAGON PEN HOLDERS

Those with long memories may remember a project called “Hexagones Landscape” [sic] that released on fxhash back in November 2022. It looked a bit like this…

Well, apparently a side project of mine is making pen holders. Because I always have a lot of pens kicking around, and the most efficient way of keeping them ready to go while taking up minimal space is to store the vertically. Here’s some I made to hold TWSBI Eco pens.

Now I need to do the same for my Pentel brush pens that are scattered all over the place, here’s an v.2 that allows you to both hold pens and create your own hexagon landscape.

v.3 was fun, but not practical…

…and v.4 is about to be sent to be printed next, so we’ll see how that goes.

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# DARK FOREST OS

Last time I said I’d write about DFOS, and I had a few emails from people saying they were interested in hearing more.

Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to play with it much more since last time. The plan was to use it some more, set up a few things, have some content there so it’s not a ghost town, then finally send out invite links.

That and I’m waiting for a couple more features to be rolled out, that I think really need to be there to make the whole thing a lot easier for people, before really going to town with it.

Hopefully I’ll have more of an update, and an invite link either next newsletter or the one after.

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# DRAWING MACHINES 101

Two more videos since last time, I wanted these to go out at the same time as they work well back-to-back.

• 2.1.0 - Setting up our template

• 2.2.0 - Drawing Lines With Loops

For a lot of people who already know a bit of code, those two are going to be all you need to get up and running writing code to make your own SVG files.

I think the second one also does a good job of showing that you don’t need much code to start to do interesting things, and the code is only half of it. With different paper, pens and even moving the machine around (sometimes while it plots) you can take some simple lines quite far.

I also uploaded the March Patreon Q&A video, which answers a bunch of questions. Even if you don’t watch the whole thing, I like the longer answer about how to get yourself into an idea creating mindset at 01:44 and the brush pen plotting at 18:52.

The whole thing is here…

I’ve finally reached the virtuous circle of creating pen plots during the making of the tutorials, which’ll form the basis of what I send out to the Patreon supporters. Getting systems and processes in place is often a hard slog, but it’s nice when it finally pays off.

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# THE END

LAMY, which I know a bunch of you use, have the popular SAFARI fountain pen, just introduced the SAFARI Roll-Ink, which is a rollerball pen that takes the BLUE T10 ink cartridge from the fountain pen; but not the ink convertor, nor do they recommend any of the other ink cartridges.

So fuck that right, I washed out the cartridge and replaced the ink with iroshizuku to-ro ink, and so far, it’s worked just fine.

I’ll update if it’s still working in the next newsletter on Thursday 18th, catch you then!

Love you all
Dan
🧡