Making a mess, making progress | Generative art diary

Plotter experiments with string & neon paint, refining glitches and getting ready to release prints next week.

Apr 18, 2025

I’m an artist and creative technologist. I write about generative art, code, creativity and other interconnected topics. You can expect a diary on Fridays sharing the things I’ve been working on. Thanks for joining me here. 💖

Hello!

Reminder:
I’ll be releasing a series of handwriting prints for sale on Weds 23rd of April!

Last week I was talking about the way making art involves a balancing act between giving in to creativity and staying disciplined to get things finished. This week has had a good mix of that - I’ve worked on a few different things, some of which felt very disciplined and some felt like completely free exploration.

I’ve been diligently working on my commission and getting the handwriting print series ready and then a few hours today were spent giving in to an idea with the plotter that was much more about fun and experimentation than goals!

Let’s look at that first.

Things I’ve done recently

Plotting with string

I’d seen a few people lately experimenting with their plotter in unusual ways and I was inspired to do something similar using string.

I started out dipping the string directly in ink and using a spiral path. I was mostly interested to see how the string moves on the paper as it’s dragged around.

I then transitioned to blobbing paint onto the paper, and used a path that simply passes up and down. I had some neon paints from Wilko (RIP) to hand, so that’s what I used.

I learned a few things right away:

Before starting I think I’d kind of been imagining that a long string would pull itself along all the way from the beginning to the end, like in the game Snake. It was immediately obvious it would actually take a long movement in one direction to move the end of a long string.
You can clearly see where the plotter returned to the home position in the top left at the end, and dragged the string all through the image, which is not ideal. To fix this, I programmed a set of points at the end of the path that make the plotter jitter back and forth and I can hit pause. (There’s probably there’s a setting somewhere to stop the plotter returning to home at the end come to think of it)
The string leaves cool patterns in the paint. Instead of just looking at where the paint is marked on the paper, it drew my attention to the marks in the paint itself.

In the next test I started out with the same simple up and down path I’d used last time, and then to create more texture I went over the top of it using a zigzag path.

The SVG path (you can see the little blob of “hit pause now, we’re done” warning points in the bottom right)

The shorter pieces of string are doing something like the texture I expected but, more noticeably, the slightly longer piece created a swoopy pattern.

This swoop was not at all coded into the plotter’s path, it’s just created by the straight zig zag path. Emergence.

Here also are some results from initial experiments with the neon paint on top of the ink.

I love how it’s is so messy, all the way up to the collection of wet string in the top left, but then also there’s such a neatness and mechanical repetition to the pattern in the strokes.

Glitch commission

Earlier in the week, I did some work on my ongoing commissioned collection.

Last time I showed you how I’d been repeating symbols in the grid to create a glitch effect. In some outputs, these repeats interact with the text in a way I didn’t love.

I refactored the code to apply the collision detection to the repeats as well, at first moving all the colliding elements out of the way.

This looked a bit too clean around the text, as well as creating little clumps of symbols just outside the text area.

I adjusted it so that some symbols are moved, some are deleted completely and some are just reduced in opacity, making the text readable but maintaining the glitchy look.

Subtler interaction between glitched symbols and text.

Next I experimented with glitching the symbols themselves. I created a path that travels across the canvas and shifted all the points in the symbols away from that path. Where the path crosses through a symbol, it stretches it.

Handwriting Prints

Last but not least, my handwriting prints are coming next week so I have been finalising designs!

I don’t want to put them all here (you’ll have to wait for the drop!) but I wanted to share this one because I showed the first image to my GenArtClub friends, asking for feedback and they had a couple of suggestions which turned it into the second image.