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… [↩]