Doctor Who TARDIS Police Box Sign

policebox-23x17

Doctor Who TARDIS Police Box sign poster, blue Sharpie on banner paper, 23″ tall x 17″ wide

Another robot drawing from Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 with the use of the pen lift mechanism.  The drawing is blue Sharpie on banner paper, 23″ tall x 17″ wide.  The dimensions refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper.  This drawing of the Doctor Who TARDIS police box sign took about two hours to finish.

Although the drawing is slightly skewed, which was caused by apparently starting the drawing from slightly off of the expected home point, I’m rather happy with this one.  I guess my personal metric for whether I’m happy with a drawing is whether the final result is immediately recognizable as the thing it is supposed to be.  The pen lifts and pen drops were very clean – resulting in (mostly) complete shapes.  You’ll notice the “T” in “PULL TO OPEN” has a gap between the pen drop and lift.  Although it might look like the “T” also suffers from a lack of straight lines, that isn’t necessarily the fault of the robot.  The drawing was created by using Inkscape’s “Trace Bitmap” function to detect the outlines from a picture of a police box sign – so the lack of perfectly straight lines might very well have been a result of Inkscape’s interpretation of a bitmap drawing.1

This was the second to last drawing the robot and I created at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014.

  1. I blame Inkscape, but I chose the settings it used. []

Doctor Who “To Victory” Dalek Poster

Doctor Who "To Victory" Dalek poster, red Sharpie on banner paper, 28" tall x 23" wide

Doctor Who “To Victory” Dalek poster, red Sharpie on banner paper, 28″ tall x 23″ wide

Another robot drawing from exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013.  This is the result of my PlotterBot drawing a cropped version of the “To Victory” Dalek poster on the BBC website which was released with the “Victory of the Daleks” episode from 2010.  ((Those faithful readers of my blog posts may recall my other attempt to memorialize this same drawing))  This drawing is red Sharpie on banner paper, 28″ tall x 23″ wide.  The dimensions refer to the drawing, not the sheet of paper.  This drawing took about eight hours.

Unfortunately, this drawing was longer than the sheet of paper I had allocated for it.  You can see at the bottom of the drawing a white uncolored patch where the blue tape was covering the edge of the paper.  However, if you can get over that defect, this is still a cool poster – and the biggest drawing I had ever done up to that point.

Since this drawing was posted on the fence at Maker Faire 2013, rolled up, archived, unrolled, transported to Maker Faire 2014 where it was displayed again, you can see a little wrinkling of the paper at the edges.  As you can also see, the drawing went off the edge of the paper.