30×30″ Painting Robot
I am back onto my painting robot project! The brush will be dipped much like a human would do it. I will add more brushes eventually though. Perhaps three or four.
I am wanting to explore color systems with these machines. I find the perception of color very interesting and I think some of the experiments will raise questions for the observer.
These machines can hang on the wall like a painting. Except it’s not a painting, it’s making a painting.
I making a 30×30″ machine out of aluminum angle and hardboard. It will have 8mm linear bearings.
I already made a small machine called Little Dipper Painting Robot but it was pretty slow and only small format (8.5×11″). Here it is making it’s first brush strokes. It seems a little clumsy but the brush pressure is actually controllable to about 40 levels and the XY accuracy is at least as accurate as I am. 🙂 It was just running a test program for proof of concept that wasn’t using all the levels of pressure.
It’s a little hard to see how it will work from the diagrams but if you look at older reports for the painting robot you can get a better idea.
Here is a machine that is a bit like what I’m making:
http://bb-lcnc.blogspot.ca/
Beagle: http://bb-lcnc.blogspot.co.at/p/machinekit_16.html
Pretty cool.
In order to replicate an artist brush stroke you would need to add gradual brush pressure.
There’s probably a ton of small techniques behind a brush stroke, brush angle, brush rotation, mixing the paint on the canvas which you could easily recreate.
I worked on some of HP’s plotters back in the day. Calibration was huge. Print one strip, scan the colour. Do it over and over, each time adjusting the amount of ink, speed, pressure (height of the print head) and each time grouping the results into usable sets. The useable sets was determined by whatever Adobe Photoshop provided since they were/are the de-facto quality image editor.
Yeah, you’re probably right this thing will be no end of fiddling. 🙂
But I think it will be a fun project. I’ve been working on it or the week. I’m working out all the electrical at the moment. The physical machine is mostly worked out…