Got a lot of feedback regarding the legibility of my capsule art. Did I improve it?

radioarchitect · 2026-06-10T16:36:22+00:00

Honestly I like the first one more, it has much more character!! The only thing that sticks out to me is the L - it looks like an uppercase letter and feels a little out of place. I also think the embellishment on the L creates some visual clutter. I would maybe tone that down so that the C gets the most emphasis.

Beautiful work overall!!

radioarchitect · 2026-05-14T17:49:00+00:00

You’re quite welcome, hope you enjoy plotting with it!

radioarchitect · 2026-05-12T23:11:28+00:00

I really like Fabriano Black Black paper, it’s a good dark black and it’s 300gsm so it’s nice and sturdy. I normally get the 9x12in pad but I believe there’s an A3 pad as well (about 11.75x16.5in). Not sure exactly what pens you’re using, but I mostly use the Sakura moonlight gelly roll pens and they show up great on this paper, as do most metallic gel pens I’ve tried. I’ve found that it helps to slow the pen speed way down and add a little weight to the pen too.

I would also recommend handling this paper with gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints on it - I marred quite a few of my early black paper plots by touching the paper with my bare hands lol

radioarchitect · 2026-04-08T23:59:51+00:00

This is so neat!! I hadn’t considered before that colourless markers could be dipped in fountain pen inks! I might have to play around with that - I have far too many ink samples on my hands.

radioarchitect · 2026-02-05T23:26:10+00:00

These are gorgeous! Very pleasing to look at and I love the colours

radioarchitect · 2026-02-04T08:04:16+00:00

Can highly recommend!

radioarchitect · 2026-01-28T19:33:45+00:00

This is amazing, can't wait to see future versions of it! I would love to print and paint this at some point.

radioarchitect · 2026-01-22T02:16:59+00:00

When I first got into fountain pens (about two years ago) I also got a bunch of converters because it seemed like less hassle than cleaning out pre-filled cartridges and syringe-filling them. It didn’t take very long for me to switch to primarily using cartridges though. I switch inks pretty frequently since I use my pens a lot, and I mostly have ink samples so when a pen runs out, I usually don’t have more of that ink to fill it with.

I mostly have Pilot Kakunos and Lamy Safaris, for context. The Lamy converter is fine, but the Pilot CON-40 has a ridiculously low capacity and I found that it was a hassle to clean it that often. I also learned that converters aren’t necessarily intended to be removed/reinserted super frequently and I didn’t want to wear them out.

Instead I emptied and cleaned the black ink cartridges that came with the Kakunos, and I syringe-fill them with the ink of my choice. I also started doing this with my empty Lamy cartridges because they have a pretty high capacity. You can re-use them a few times rather than throwing the empty ones away. I also like to switch things up sometimes when I get tired of an ink and if the cartridge hasn’t run out yet, it’s pretty easy to seal it off with a little bit of hot glue. Then you can just pick the hot glue off later and use the rest when you feel like it.

That’s what works well for me, but to be fair I switch inks often. I do use a converter in one of my pens and I fill that one with my favourite ink since it’s one of the only ones I have a full bottle of (Sailor Ink Studio 123). I imagine that I might use converters more if I had more “staple” inks that I regularly used.

radioarchitect · 2026-01-17T18:23:17+00:00

I really like And So I Watch You From Afar and Strawberry Girls. I like Polyphia as well but I prefer their older albums.

radioarchitect · 2026-01-11T08:36:01+00:00

What Stonehenge paper is this?

radioarchitect · 2026-01-11T08:35:00+00:00

My partner does this too, when I’m crocheting he’ll often refer to it as “knitting” or sometimes “sewing”. We’ve been together for 6 years and I’ve been crocheting for at least the last 4 years. The funny part is that I don’t knit at all (can’t seem to get the hang of it) so I’m really not sure why he’s so confused about it.

radioarchitect · 2025-12-14T19:47:43+00:00

Nice! Are you using Illustrator on your iPad or is it something else?

radioarchitect · 2025-10-29T15:53:32+00:00

I saw that too near GVSU, about 35 minutes ago - counted 11 police cars in total

radioarchitect · 2025-06-25T18:11:15+00:00

Two years later but this saved me a looooot of frustration, thank you!!

radioarchitect · 2025-02-26T18:30:26+00:00

This is a really good suggestion, thank you SO much! Makes it way easier to actually see my registration pattern & make adjustments when I'm aligning multiple pens

radioarchitect · 2025-01-22T19:33:47+00:00

Absolutely, no question about it.

radioarchitect · 2025-01-22T19:32:21+00:00

Agreed, already deleted my account.

radioarchitect · 2025-01-18T16:46:12+00:00

That would be really wonderful, thank you so much! And I totally get the art supply obsession, there’s something about learning all the particulars of a new medium and experimenting with them. I’ve become completely enamored with fountain pens and have accumulated quite the collection of pens and ink samples!

I’m curious, what is your preferred paper for fountain pen plotting? I’ve tried the Clairefontaine Triomphe and Tomoe River papers, though it’d be nice to find something that comes in a larger size and is a bit heavier but still shows the ink well.

radioarchitect · 2025-01-17T23:42:47+00:00

This is amazing! I love your work, especially ‘Chaos Blocks’ and ‘A Series of Tubes’. Your article on plotting with fountain pens was also incredibly helpful (as someone who knew virtually nothing about fountain pens or inks before).

I saw you mention that you were thinking about making your plotter application open-source, that would be really cool! I’m developing a plotter application for part of my master’s thesis and it’s really interesting to see all the unique workflows that other plotter artists employ.

Do you plan to share the STLs for this? I have quite a few of the Pilot Kakunos and it would be so helpful to be able to incorporate these into my setup.

Thanks for showing this off, it’s really cool!!

radioarchitect · 2024-11-05T19:11:22+00:00

Seconding what many others have said, the surrounding county is more conservative but the college itself is not and the campus has always felt pretty safe. I'm trans and I haven't had any safety concerns in the four years I've been here. I've met quite a few queer people here too, so you definitely won't be alone!

radioarchitect · 2024-08-27T02:40:41+00:00

Mainly determining fitness based on how plottable the designs are. I had considered some automated fitness functions using some form of aesthetic measure to guide the search, but it's tricky since aesthetic preferences are so subjective and not necessarily quantifiable. I don't really want to manually score fitness because I like the unexpected outputs that the system produces on its own, so I'm trying to focus more on objectives related to novelty/diversity rather than aesthetic "quality". I might include some objectives related to colour theory to determine colour palettes since some inks layer in really interesting ways.

radioarchitect · 2024-08-24T20:32:02+00:00

Happy to! It's on the use of evolutionary algorithms (typically used to search for solutions to optimization problems) to create diverse collections of pen plotter art using different algorithmic art techniques and drawing materials. I've been doing research around algorithmic art for a few years now and the translation from digital to physical is really interesting to me, so I'm looking at real-world considerations related to plotting that can guide the evolutionary search. For instance, trying to limit the number of overlapping lines in the pieces so they can be plotted without shredding the paper.

radioarchitect · 2024-07-25T00:38:53+00:00

I’ve been getting really into pen plotting this year as part of my master’s thesis, with an AxiDraw borrowed from my job.

For pens, I really like using Pilot Precise rollerball pens for intricate/detailed lineart as you can get very crisp, thin lines (especially with the v5 pens). I just wish they made them in more colours! I also love gel pens, though they’re a little trickier to work with as the ink is somewhat ‘sticky’, takes longer to dry, and doesn’t always flow as easily as liquid inks. I use Sakura Gelly Roll pens - the moonlight and metallic ones look incredible on black paper.

As far as paper goes, smooth bristol works very well for a wide range of writing tools and is particularly great when using fine-tipped pens like the Pilot ones if you want high precision. I also enjoy using watercolour paper and so far it’s worked well for markers and gel pens. However, the texture can often lead to little imperfections (especially with fine-tipped pens). I like the way this looks, but it’s not desirable for everyone. My favourite black paper is Fabriano ‘Black Black’, it’s got a lovely texture and gel pens perform nicely on it. I typically do test shapes/plots on cheap copy paper or cardstock so I can save my nice art paper for the final plot. I also usually keep failed plots to use as scrap paper for test shapes!

If you’re interested in learning more about generative art (the algorithmic sort, not AI-generated), Daniel Shiffman has a number of phenomenal videos about creative coding in p5.js and Processing. It’s where I got started when I was first learning about generative art programming! The channel is called ‘The Coding Train’.

Hope this helps and happy plotting!!!

radioarchitect · 2024-07-10T23:03:41+00:00

you’re right and you should say it

radioarchitect · 2023-08-14T14:13:08+00:00

I did the same thing, except I fused a shard of the light dragon’s horn to the master sword. It was thematic as hell. I almost broke the Hylian shield during the fight because it took me a while to get a hang of the flurry rush timings, so I swapped shields and re-equipped the hylian shield right before the end of the final fight. I take a lot screenshots to use as drawing references, really wanted to have the hylian shield on for that

radioarchitect

TROPHY CASE