PlotterBot drawn Calvin & Hobbes
It must be that school is almost out and summer is in the air – because I started thinking back to my favorite comic strip of all time – Calvin & Hobbes. I made the above drawing by taking a picture of a small 1″ x 1″ comic and “tracing” it into a vector graphic in Inkscape.1 Once I had an outline I was happy with, I used the EggBot extension for Inkscape from EMSL to add a hatching “shading” design to the drawing. If I had made the hatching close together or used a wider tipped pen, this could have been a lot darker. However, I really like the way it turned out.
The final drawing is about 19″ tall and 24″ wide.
Since this drawing took about two hours, I took pictures at intervals from my digital camera on a tripod. I compiled them together into an animated GIF, below. (Please let me know if you can’t see it)
Draw PlotterBot! Draw like the wind!
The result is a two hour drawing completed in just under two seconds. Nice, eh?
Also, if you need your Calvin & Hobbes fix, this website is running the old comics one day at a time.
- A tutorial is forthcoming… [↩]
Hey, I was wondering if you needed the Polargraph SD to do this type of a print. Did you just upload the svg file as a vector? Did the servo lift the pen automatically when it moved between lines? I’ve tried a vector before, but the servo wouldn’t lift the pen when it was moving from line to line.
@David: I did Sandy Noble’s Polargraph SD for my drawings. His software allows you to import an SVG vector file and the output code should include all the servo lifts you need. As for your problem – did the pen lift work when you tried it manually? How about when you tried to do so programmatically?