Pen plotters are designed for precision. This project explores how to make them behave otherwise. I wanted to explore working with less controlled materials that bleed, layer, and has more texture. Over the course of this project I experimented with watercolor, acrylic, and alcohol markers on yupo, printmaking, watercolor, and Xuan paper. These led to the development of a custom pipeline that converts photographs into multi-color hatched drawings that read more like paintings than prints.

Key challenge - Colors!

A photograph contains way more values than a set of markers. The algorithm identifies a small palette of foundation colors that span the perceptual range of the original input. It then assigns regions of the image to those inks and generates hatching at different angles for each layer, so overlapping strokes optically mix the way inks do on paper.

The layering logic is similar to painting, light colors first as a base layer, and darker tones build on top. Colors in the same hue family share territory and contrasting colors stay strictly separate.

Paper absorbency, marker pressure, and ink bleed introduce variation that the artist nor the algorithm can fully control.