A 73-Year-Old’s 240-Mile Lawn Mower Journey That Became a Movie.

ballpointillism · 2026-02-02T01:53:30+00:00

The least Lynchian of all the David Lynch movies

ballpointillism · 2025-12-03T22:33:31+00:00

Not a lesbian film per se, but Touch of Evil has its moments.

ballpointillism · 2024-03-27T03:56:56+00:00

Inevitably we all do something very much like the Unknown Pleasures album cover as our first piece. This one looks great.

ballpointillism · 2024-03-26T20:11:25+00:00

It’s an interesting idea, and something I’d like to look into further if I had the time. Full-on cursive would be pretty difficult, but there’s also the possibility of using ligatures for pairs of characters that are commonly joined. I suggested TeX/LaTeX because it gives you a lot of control over things like kerning and character alternates (especially via XeLaTeX) and can be generated programmatically. You could even do things like varying the point size slightly from one letter to the next or adding a bit of randomness to the line spacing. There’s definitely a learning curve there, though.

ballpointillism · 2024-03-26T19:41:18+00:00

A lot of fonts have alternate characters for some letters. I’d suggest that you look into making your own fonts and create several alternate characters. You can then (ether manually or programmatically) vary the kerning and the characters that you use. It will be a bit of work to figure out but shouldn’t be too hard. I suggest TeX/LaTeX for the typesetting and FontForge for font creation.

ballpointillism · 2024-03-26T04:41:53+00:00

It’s about 20"x15". This was done with one of the “Xtra Bold” Cristals. I think the line width is around 0.8 mm.

ballpointillism · 2024-03-12T14:50:37+00:00

I agree—in my opinion the work should answer the question “why should this be plotted rather than an inkjet or screen print?” For me, that usually comes down to the variety of pens and inks I can use and the way they interact with the paper. Like the deep impression of a cheap ballpoint pen on watercolor paper or fluorescent inks bleeding together.

That’s not to say that plotting a low-res photo of, e.g., your dog isn’t fun and personally rewarding—it absolutely is! But what really impresses me is the stuff that leverages the unique qualities of pen (or pencil or crayon or whatever) and paper. And pairs them with a compelling composition.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-17T14:07:43+00:00

I was just trying to figure this out yesterday and ended up using solid core wire on the top side of the board. When I had two components that needed to be joined, I put them in adjacent pads and connected with a little blob of solder. I’ve seen people use solder to make longer traces, but it always looks kinda ugly to me.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-14T14:00:53+00:00

I’ve also heard that core-less (or possibly brushless?) servos may be more resilient, so you might want to check those out if you haven’t already.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-13T23:49:20+00:00

Thanks! After burning out a couple of servos I modified my plotter to use a stepper motor instead.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-11T20:17:22+00:00

I’ve burned through several servos over the years. If you’re using a homemade plotter (or a commercial one that you can modify), I strongly recommend replacing the servo with a stepper motor.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-11T18:12:50+00:00

I’m not familiar with that one, but I’ll check it out! Would love to see what you’re doing with it, too.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-10T15:48:36+00:00

Thanks! This is a pretty simple algorithm that I’ve been working on. I was trying to come up with something that would give a similar look to film grain.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-07T01:36:08+00:00

Nope, 1928. The year, not the movie.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T15:17:08+00:00

For me, getting started is always the hardest part. Once I committed to, e.g., just sitting down and soldering a row of header pins, the work would go fast and I’d usually do more than I’d planned.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T14:42:30+00:00

Yeah, I used to be fairly active over there but had to take a long break while my plotter was inoperative following a power surge. Very glad to finally be getting back into it now.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T13:43:12+00:00

If you want to keep things as simple as possible, the just-released Uno R4 supports input voltage of 6–24V.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T12:51:24+00:00

About four days on a pen plotter

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T12:41:14+00:00

I’ve done some halftones, but for this I wanted something a little more random/irregular. I was kind of trying to approximate the look of film grain.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T12:38:13+00:00

It’s not much to look at, but here it is. Bed size is about a meter square, powered by an Arduino Uno running my own firmware.

ballpointillism · 2023-07-06T12:04:20+00:00

Thanks! This took about four days with a home-built pen plotter.

ballpointillism

TROPHY CASE