My pen plotter has finally arrived yesterday! Just in time for Genuary. Here are my chaotic videos (Instagram Stories) from the first day of plotting:
First, let’s talk briefly about Genuary and then go back to the plotter. Genuary is a yearly online “event”, held in January, where people make generative art loosely based on prompts that are released each day of the month. I want to take part this year, for the first time, but I’m not committing to dailies. I’m planning to use the plotter for all submissions. I’ll be posting my drawings on Mastodon, Instagram, YouTube, and Threads (giving it a try).
So, the pen plotter. I knew about their existence for years, but never felt the appeal. If you look at my recent projects, you’ll see that I like to combine and push all my skills at the same time: write a 2D compute shader, put it in a 3D animation, compose custom/responsive music, etc. The problem is that projects like these take 100–300 hours. Before I was a father, I could finish such a project in a month or two. Now, it’s more like eight months, or one a year. It doesn’t feel good to be stuck with a single idea for so long (and think that “it’s still not done…” for most of the time). I’d rather have more short projects, explore more ideas, make more things, and increase the chance of stumbling upon something good. I thought that with the pen plotter I could make something visually appealing, but given its constraints it will save me from the shader+Blender+animation+music scope creep. (This is, of course, a lie only partially true.)
I bought the Bantam Tools NextDraw A3 pen plotter, the successor to AxiDraw (that I couldn’t buy as it was discontinued), which came out this year (a month or two after I decided to buy a plotter). I was waiting for it to come out and then to become available in Europe. I wanted to buy it from an European reseller, because I didn’t want to deal with taxes, duties, US shipping, potential returns, and warranty. I ended up pre-ordering the NextDraw from RobotShop. It was supposed to be available in two months, which turned out to be five months. I’m happy I got the order, but at the end I was getting frustrated with the delay and the (lack of) communication. I don’t know if the delay was caused by Bantam Tools or RobotShop, but either way it didn’t feel great to see Bantam Tools’ Black Friday ads with free attachments and information that the machine is in stock, while mine was paid for months ago and still not on the horizon.
Before I got the plotter, I spent months preparing for its arrival. Since May, I’ve been building a bespoke creative coding environment for pen plotter sketches in TypeScript and Vue. It was a deliberate time investment, that I think was greatly valuable career-wise as well. I had a break from serious web frontend development for about ten years and it’s been refreshing to see that the experience these days is actually great. TypeScript and Vue is my favourite ecosystem right now (I do mostly Python+Django and Swift+SwiftUI professionally). I kick-started the project by asking a friend to organize a Vue workshop, which was a fun and time-efficient way to learn the basics, ask dozens of questions, and get a head start.
Now, I’m ready to start the long journey of learning the nuances of instructing a robot to draw on paper. I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities and seeing what I can make.