Sometimes we manage to miss projects when they first appear, only to have the joy of discovering them a while later. So it is with [John Opsahl]’s Project Convert To Paint, a CNC painting ‘bot that takes a bitmap image and paints it on canvas as a fine artist would, with a real brush, and paints.
It was first created for the 2017 robotart.org competition, and takes the form of a fairly standard CNC gantry machine. It departs from the norm in its chuck however, as it has what is described as a universal artist chuck, capable of holding a variety of artistic implements. The images are converted from bitmap to vector format, and thence to gcode with the help of a bit of custom Python code.
He’s at pains to say that simply because an image can be converted to a paintable format does not mean that it will produce a good picture. But some of the results are rather impressive, delivering anything from a pointilist effect to a broader brush stroke. We can see that with a bit of experience in the processing it would be possible to create a veritable gallery of masterpieces.
We may have missed this one the first time, but we did catch another drawbot from the same competition.
I have a machine that does a similar thing in that it lays down a pattern of pigment embedded in resin based on an image, it is called a colour laser printer. It produces images or reproductions, it does not produce fine art.
I bet you’re a blast at parties. Did you build your laser printer?
Unlike a printer, this has fantastic potential for more vector based art. However, this video shows it producing raster images, and pretty inefficiently.
I’ve never seen art made like this outside of the CNC art world. Yes, pointillism is a style, but it’s not done like this.
This machine has much potential for more interesting and artistic work – especially with that interesting chuck – but this video isn’t showing its potential.
This is a very interesting project! Based on the pictures, I couldn’t tell that the paintings weren’t made by a human.
And thanks for mentioning robotart.org; I had no idea that the site existed!
Was expecting something less pixelated in nature. Sadly more interested in the CNC design.
Search for Momus CNC ;)
Not fully open source but they have a pretty good documentation. However the build is a bit difficult in my mind.
Momus CNC. Thanks. It does look a little intricate but tough. wood is cheaper than steel except exotics and fine. excessive bolting me thinks. arrh. worthy of investigation.
Great project!
I wonder how difficult it would be to make a brush with a built in dispenser so you wouldn’t have to keep going back to dip the brush. I’m thinking maybe a hollow tube with the bristles on one end and a servo actuated syringe or something on the other end.
seems like I saw a video on youtube recently of someone making a cake decorator that used a syringe.. might’ve been makers muse.
I have seen calligraphy pens that use a brush instead of a nib. Depending how close you are to the surface, you get a line of variable thickness.
Old plotters carried multiple pens, for each colour and line width. You would still need multiple pens for different colours.
CNC producing art… I didn’t dig into details, but guess it to be STEAM powered.
robotart.org Another URL that could benefit from a hyphen to prevent misreading it as robo tart.