Paint with the plotter

Did you know?

There is a course (coming up) about the subject of painting with plotters

In short

To be able to paint with the plotter, we include the dipping in the paint as if it was a piece of the drawing itself. This way, the plotter will dip the brush in the paint and can continue painting. To make this work, we need to follow these steps:

Artwork preparation

• As always, you need a vector file consisting out of paths.
• Group all the paths into their specific color layer. There is an option in Illutstrator to select everything based on a specific color.
  • TODO: could this be done with a script?
• Name the layers with the color you want to use. We’ve experienced that we need the following additional steps to make the dipping script work:
  • Open the SVG in Inkscape
  • Make shure that the layers are effectively layers. (Mayebe you need to do a right-click → make layer)
  • Right-click on a layer, pick ‘Rename layer’ and double-check if the name is correct. Sometimes it just says ‘Layer 1’ or something like that.

Prepare your artwork: group all the paths into their specific color layer.

• Install Vpype
• Use this script [https://gist.github.com/SimonVanherweghe/fd741b90fa4063c222b690a42d3d171a] to implement the dipping pattern

vpype read --no-crop linestest.svg -I autodip.vpy