Double-Ended Drawing
For our weekly assignment for Drawing++ at the MIT Media Lab, we were told to create a new drawing tool:
“Create a code based drawing tool — can you extend gestures in an interesting way or “complicate” the act of drawing?”
I wanted to experiment with unexpected ways that you could draw with the most expect drawing utensil: a pen. I ended up landing on the idea of drawing with the back end of a pen. I used some basic computer vision to detect the green dot I attached to the back end of my pen and then simply instructed my Axidraw pen plotter to follow the detected location of the back end of my pen. This meant that as I created a normal drawing with the nib of my pen, my Axidraw concurrently created the related drawing traced by the butt of my pen.
What I really like about this project is that the two drawings are related according to a rigid stick of constant length, and yet despite the simplicity of their connection, the drawings end up being surprisingly different.
My program has a couple of different settings: “Live”, where the Axidraw would keep pace with the speed at which I was drawing by hand, and as a result sacrifice precision, “Record”, where I would first draw a complete shape by hand and once I had finished the Axidraw would asynchronously plot its drawing slowly and with higher precision, and finally “Non-blocking Live”, which I used in the video above. Non-blocking Live creates its drawing live concurrently with your own drawing, but unlike “Live” mode, it allows itself to fall behind the rate at which the person draws, catching up after you’ve finished if needed. In order to show the relationship between the two drawings, I edited their relative speeds to match.
Non-blocking live mode is what I believe really makes this a reasonable drawing tool. It’s precise enough to be interesting but it doesn’t require you to give special commands and interrupt your drawing process. It runs automatically in the background whenever you are drawing.
I did add one more mode, distinct from the other three. Instead of sending commands to a pen plotter to literally create a physical drawing with the butt of my pen, instead, this one simply draws a line over the live video feed. I found this interesting as it was the only mode in which I can have both drawings visible on a single sheet of paper.
