Progress bar (genuary day 7)

A pen plotter drawing inherently gives you a progress indicator as it is drawn as you can see how much ink has been put down on the paper so far, but I wanted to incorporate a literal progress bar that would become a natural part of the image.

Here I generated an island scene (yay, a better use for that dithering code), with the progress bar part drawn in a separate colour at first, and added back in after optimizing the rest of the image for plotting. Technically it shows how many optimized paths have been drawn so far, not overall progress, but it's probably still more accurate than most file copy estimates.

Of course the ink ran out after about three hours... But I could measure the progress bar and restart at around the right layer.

A3 420×297mm
Black ink on white card, 0.5mm Staedtler technical pen
~4 hours

#penplotter #penplotterart #island #dithering #genuary #genuary7 #genuary2024 #inkdrawing #timelapse

5 months ago