Drawing Machines

Please visit my blog to view documented projects involving drawing machines and other interesting art projects.

Oscar’s Blog: 
http://blubee.com/theblog 

Here is a link to the video of it spraying.

Materials

• 8.5″x11″ sheet of white paper
• fine-tipped black pen
• clock or watch - this is a time-based drawing

Process

• Once you have read all of the instructions, consult your clock or watch. You will be drawing continuously for 10 minutes.
• Use only circles, rectangles, and triangles in this drawing.
• Shapes may be of any size, but they must be perceptible to the naked human eye as the shape they represent.
• Shapes may not intersect or overlap one another
• Start your drawing in the lower left corner of the page.
• Focus on filling the space with these shapes and on the patterns they make in positive and negative space.
• After the 10 minutes are complete, give the drawing a title.

Pretend for a moment that you are a camera with an open shutter recording the movement of a lightning bug trapped in a jar. Every few seconds, someone taps on the jar to stir the bug into motion. Draw the traces the lightning bug makes moving from surface to surface inside the jar as it tries to escape.

Here.

I’m not completely sure of the accuracy of this site, but it has a bunch of information about colors, EM spectrum, and how we see.

Video of it in action.

And the photos:

1 

2 

3 

4 

I created another interactive drawing machine in Processing. I was interested in exploring fields of color that have a mesmerizing quality.

There are two versions. The first simply runs by itself. The second is interactive.

I was also working on a more physical drawing machine which I hope with some experimentation will become my final project for this class.

For my week five physical drawing machine exercise, I created a drawing machine inspired by the “Theory of Color,” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The idea is simple, Contrary to Newton, whose “Opticks” was generally regarded to be the authoritative study on the refraction of light, Goethe believed color was the interaction of dark and light.

Newton’s prism experiments led him to conclude that light was composed of 7 distinct colors. Goethe believed there were only two pure colors, yellow and blue—yellow turning into red in a turbid medium and the entire scale of color mixing in such a manner.

I constructed a drawing machine that hangs from above, moving only when the air stirs it¹. There are two colored pencils attached to the arms of a servo motor, one blue, the other yellow. The servo motor is controlled by an arduino board and arranged so that only one pencil touches the ground at a time depending on the reading of a photo sensor: when the room is dark, only the yellow pencil touches. When it is bright, the blue pencil touches. This is a reference to Goethe’s idea of color as light and dark in conflict, and his observation that the colors seen at a light/dark boundary depends on the orientation, reversing when the light and dark colors are flipped.

¹ Thanks to two uncontrollable radiators, my windows are constantly wide open.

Check out the Wikipedia article.  At the bottom is a link to the .pdf of photographs by Sakae Tajima illustrating Goethe’s prismatic experiments.