This my favourite pen plotting thing Iāve seen in the past couple of weeks, built by Frank Force, over on github here: https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/VirtualPlotter and a demo running here: https://killedbyapixel.github.io/VirtualPlotter/
Normally I wouldnāt link to something still early in itās work-in-progress phase, and thereās been changes and new features added since I last looked, so I guess, keep in mind that itās in flux.
One of the reactions over on reddit made me laugh.
āThis is both so dumb and so brilliant at the same timeā
I think itās wonderful and useful for a few reasons.
Iām making drawing machine tutorial videos (I may have mentioned it), and some people watching those donāt have a pen plotter yet. While you can just look at the SVG output, I think itās more useful to be able to see what would (most likely) actually happen, and see it getting drawn. You get a much better sense of how your code relates to the actual act of plotting.
If Iām running workshops, or a class for students itās normal for the number of students to outnumber the plotters, and also a single plot can take a while essentially blocking a whole machine. With this virtual plotter students can start experimenting and quickly iterating on designs, and also see something interesting happen based on their code.
If you have a drawing machine running at a gallery or show, itād be fun to have the virtual one running on a screen nearby so people can pick from a list of designs and see them get āplottedā (the tool allows you to speed up the plot). Or even have two screens/system; one where people can twiddle-knobs to make their own design and then send to the Virtual plotter. The code is up on github so shouldnāt be hard to bridge like that.
[feature coming soon š¤] - being able to select the plotter size, paper size and give it your design, then watch in horror when it tries to plot your A3 design onto an A5 sheet of paper, with an A4 plotter, with all the correct crunchy noises. Because weāve all accidentally done that, and itād be nice to sanity check a plot youāre about to do.
Thinking about it, if I were Bantam Tools, with access to the 3d cad files of the NextDraw, Iād snap up a custom version of this, swap out the plain rectangular carriages for NextDraw styled ones (it uses threejs after all) and put it on the website as a useful tool.
# IPADing
Alrighty, so, over on Patreon this month the theme is pen plotting, but on an iPad. Which is something Iāve been wanting to try for a while.
Specifically coding in the location of various bits of UI on the Procreate app, so Kitty (my AI PA) can have access to creating new pages, selecting brushes, colours and brush size, and then having a go a drawing.
Thereās about a million reasons why this is somewhat foolish, but also, itās fun, and maybe I can get Kitty to play Hearthstone too š¹ļø
I knew the first thing Iād need would be a way to have the iPad always been in a known position relative to the plotter, so I took some measurements., which you can see hereā¦
Then went through a number of iterations of a jig, four in total.
The last thing to do was take account of the camera bump in the corner of the iPad that makes it not lay flat - which is fucking weird from a design point of view if you think about it too much, Braun would never!
Anyway, I guess who needs the iPad to lay flat? Well, this guy.
So with a bonus corner, and 2.3mm high āledgesā I ended up with something that fixed to the feet of a NextDraw 8511, with the exact measurements to hold a 13ā iPad Pro (M4 I think)
Which I know is incredibly niche, but once again an example of the usefulness of a 3d printer and being able to make your own shims and jigs for this kinda of thing, and also attaching things to the feet of the plotter is cool (imho).
# TOOLS
I like the āArt Studio Robots!ā in the title of this newsletter, oh, but waitā¦
Annoyingly I canāt find the link because it showed up in my Instagram stream and now I canāt find it again. I mean itās this reel from drawscape, but it was one that was shared/reposted š¤·āāļø on someone elseās account. So while this one has a couple of comments, the one I saw had like a gabillionā¦
ā¦thankfully for me I saved a bunch of the comments, Iām going to put a few choice ones down below, grouped into Genus, this was the top oneā¦
āTo start, itās not a robot, but an automaton, because it doesnāt make any decisions... but then, that technology already existed in 1953. As a hobby project itās fine, but calls things by their name. Anyway, nice drawing.ā
ā¦and I donāt think that āDrawing Machines & Notes from Art Studio automatonā has quite the same ring to it.
There was also team āvectorā
Bro itās called vectoring and it takes like 5 seconds
Vectors šŖš¶
so its vectors
Fancy way to avoid saying VECTORS
Now, while these people may be technically correct and technically cockwombles they appear to be failing to grasp the difference between saying-what-the-thing-is-technically-correctly and marketing.
While drawscape does isnāt my cup of tea, I think itās a brilliant product/project; an ever growing library of āblueprintsā that people can order, specify the paper and pen type, and then theyāre pen plotted to order. Itās like a perfectly neat, self contained, well focused business, with little overheads except time and dedication.
The hard part is explaining, or marketing what exactly it is to people. First you have to explain why itās different to normal printing, why they should care, how itās not āmass producedā in the traditional sense, and there how itāll make a great gift.
Saying āhereās a series of deterministically programmed toolpaths made from vertices and vectors, outputted as GCODE and draw with an automaton x,y plotterā doesnāt have quite the same ring, and means pretty much fuck all to anyone who doesnāt already know what the hell all that means.
(all those phrases were mentioned in the comments btw)
From the āitās a plotterā gang, who donāt seem to grasp that ārobotā makes more sense to most people than āplotterā.
Look up the word āplotterā for goodness sake
Pen plotter!!!ā¦ š¤£šš¤£š Hewlett Packard had HP 7475A, 7575A plotter back in 1980. I know because I got sick and tired of fixing, replacing, calibrating and adjusting the pen carriage and pen carriage belts!!! Beautiful device! Nothing new!!!
Letās reinvent the plotter and call it something else.
Thereās also the āmy 3d printer can do thisā cohort, of which there were too many to mention, but this was my favouriteā¦
āImagine getting all excited because youāre using a 3D printer like itās an ā80s plotter, when a 3D printer is literally just the evolution of those same plotters with one extra dimension added (2D ā 3D).ā
Drawscape is literally using a 2d plotter in the video.
Iām not even sure if their āmy 3d printer can do thisā is the flex they think it is while watching a video about a tool specifically designed to do the job itās doing š¤·āāļø
And finally of course
canāt u just get chatgpt to do it for you
Is this AI art ??
Howās this different from AI art ?
AI does it in seconds
Ai may be taking artists jobs
I guess the short take away from this is; if you try and make something easier for most people to understand - which is good - and you get a sudden influx of viewers (due to reposting or whatever), then with great views comes great fuckwittery.
Thankfully I didnāt attempt to respond to anyone, that way lies madness.
# THE END
In the last newsletter I mention how it was hot, too hot, too hot to do anything.
Yeah, well, that, but with a couple more degree Celsius thrown on top, which means Iām technically 1.06451613% more hot and grumpy today than I was when I wrote the last newsletter. Which probably also explains why this one is about 30mins late, and most likely full of typos!
The next newsletter - Thursday 23rd July, 2026 for those following along at home - will hopefully be written in a somewhat cooler studio. Otherwise that one is even more likely to end up in the spam filter than this one due to excessive swearing.
I was going to make the next couple of Drawing Machine 101 videos this week, but I would die, so once again weāre waiting another week for those. Iām waiting for them all to be over so I can get back to normal making videos about what Iām doing.
Although Iām starting to feel that having a series of āhow to code for drawing machinesā on YouTube is going to be my only defence against ābro this was vibe coded!ā - I can simply point them to far too many hours of hand written from start to end plotter code and tell them to come back to me after watching all that.
Actually those videos and all the previous ones going back years may be the only way to prove Iām a real human who can really code, thank goodness I started back then rather than now.
And on that cheery note.
Love you all
Dan
š§”
Ah yes, the "the camera bump in the corner of the iPad", a.k.a. the "mess up the edge of my nice vintage wood nightstands" feature. š
We need a cockwomble emoji to save time and effort.