Garden, Monoliths #89 - Pen-plotter drawing - edition 1 - 50 x 50 cm
This video documents one of the most technically challenging iterations of Garden, Monoliths to execute on a pen plotter.
Unlike previous works in the series, this drawing uses tinted paper. To preserve the white flowers, I first had to fill their shapes with dense hatch patterns using an opaque white pigment ink. Those patterns did not exist in the original Garden, Monoliths algorithm, which meant extending the code to generate a more capable SVG specifically for plotting.
The density of the composition added another layer of complexity. As the landscape recedes toward the horizon, the drawing gradually switches to increasingly finer technical pens to preserve detail without saturating the paper. Throughout the process, several pen changes are required.
This piece also marks an important milestone in the evolution of the project. It was the first Garden, Monoliths drawing in which the transparent colour washes were applied by the plotter itself. Until then, every colour layer had been painted by hand: an extremely time-consuming process. Achieving this required writing new software capable of translating the digital colour information into plotting instructions that reproduced the translucent appearance of the original artwork.
- 0'00"Start drawing the white background for the flowers. Rotring white ink and Isograph 0.5mm
- 0'10"The flowers are filled with white. This ink is pigmented and opaque, it has to be drawn first, before any dark outline.
- 0'15"Outlining the flowers. Rotring 0.5mm
- 0'50"Outlining the berries - Rotring 0.5mm
- 0'57"Monoliths' outer lines - Rotring 1.0 mm, Grey ink. Slowing down for these fat strokes to have sufficient ink flow
- 1'13"Plants' stems - Rotring 0.5mm
- 1'19"Outlines of leaves
- 1'31"Performing a pen switch from 0.5mm to 0.3mm, to reduce the ink density in this crowded area and improve the details
- 1'38"Second herb species, Rotring 0.3mm
- 1'50"Hours pass by...
- 1'55"Tracing stems - Rotring 0.3mm
- 2'01"Another pen switch : from Rotring 0.3mm to Staedtler Mars matic 0.2mm
- 2'08"Getting closer to finish
- 2'14"Drawing details of leaves - Staedtler Marc Matic 0.2mm
- 2'30"Branches and bushes - Rotring 0.3mm
- 3'10"Monoliths hatch texture - Staedtler 0.3mm + Dark Grey ink
- 3'31"Final, crucial lines, which required absolute precision in the setup, not to ruin everything
- 3'50"The line art is now complete !
- 3'58"Starting the coloring part : first, berries
- 4'09"To enable coloring, I had to implement a new feature into the original Garden, Monoliths code
- 4'21"It's fascinating to watch the plotter fill up all the berries so fast ! (I used to paint them by hand)
- 4'37"A much diluted mix of green inks is applied on the plants' leaves
- 4'46"Inking after the outlines is only possible if every other ink underneath is perfectly waterproof. Otherwise, the whole drawing would bleed.
- 4'57"I noticed a bit too late that something was off. Some green was painted onto the Monolith, which shouldn't have happened.
- 5'03"So I removed the pen and tried to figure out what I did wrong.
- 5'07"It turned out it was in the code. After fixing it and regenerating a SVG file, the job could be resumed.
- 5'12"I used the occasion to modify the ink mix for a less saturated shade.
- 5'29"But then I proceeded with a darker overlay to emulate the watercolor, transparent effect in Garden, Monoliths
- 5'37"A (not much optimized) pattern that puts color in places where the green leaves overlap
- 6'07"The drawing is finished ! Aerial view.
