Sites, courses & tutorials

DrawingBots.net

One of the best sites on the internet for finding out more about drawing machines. They also have a Discord server full of people who know all sorts of things about drawing machines. Plus great advice for building and troubleshooting (you can also ping me @revdancatt)

Painting with Plotters - course by Licia He

Painting With Plotters is a virtual course that introduces Licia He's method for making generatively-designed, plotter-rendered paintings using a variety of water-based paint. A great companion this this course.

Drawing Machines for Artists, Coding Course - course by Daniel Catt

This is the website for the YouTube course materials for the course "Drawing Machines for Artists, Coding Course" created by Daniel Catt.

Generative Hut - "The home of generative art"

Contains tutorials, plotter reviews, and more.

Dirt Alley Design - from Michelle Chandra

A bunch of useful tutorials, projects, and more from Michelle. Plus the yearly Plot Party, a week-long pen plotting art challenge, and postcard exchange. Find out more by following @penplotart on Instagram.

How to pen plot on black paper

Everyone wants to plot with white ink on black paper, and it's always a pain in the ass, Michelle (again) has some answers.

Why I use fountain pens with pen plotters - James Merrill

A love letter to using fountain pens with pen plotters.

/r/PlotterArt

A subreddit for all things pen plotters.

Awesome Plotters - a constantly updated list of (fairly nerdy) pen plotter stuff.

A curated list of code and resources for computer-controlled drawing machines and other visual art robots.

Hardware

NextDraw pen plotter (was AxiDraw)

This is the pen plotter I use (get 5% off with the code DANCATT2024)

iDraw pen plotter

This is the other pen plotter I use (a bit cheaper, a bit faster, a bit less sturdy) and 10% off with the code revdancatt

Makelangelo 5

A fun and fancy wall hanging pen plotter, space saving and looks pretty awesome!

OpenBuilds ACRO system - build your own plotter!

Feeling a bit handy, here's a system for building your own.

Software

Some of this stuff is a bit technical, and we'll be mainly writing our own code. But there are some, more technical, things here you may find useful once you've found your feet.

Inkscape

A free and open source vector graphics editor, this is what we'll be using to send the SVG design to the plotter. You can also use this to create designs if you don't want to code, see more on this topic in a blog post by Anna.

p5.js

A JavaScript library for creating interactive visuals. You can use this to create the SVG designs and more (i.e. generative art).

vsketch - a Python generative art toolkit for plotters

A great python tool for generating SVG file to send to the plotter. Once you've finished this course using a tool like this should be a bit easier.

vpype - the Swiss-Army-knife command-line tool for plotter vector graphics

If you got the hang of vsketch, then this is the next step, a handy tool for doing a lot of different things with your SVG files once you've made them.

saxi - a good way for controlling your plotter

Don't want to tether your laptop to the plotter, stick this onto a Raspberry Pi and you'll be good to go. Handy for doing art installations when you get to that point.