A plotted portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This is a single line, which starts at the top left corner and ends in the lower left. The line has waves in it, which get more extreme in areas of darker colour, as can be seen on the detail photographs below.
The image was created by first converting an image of the queen into monochrome. It was then sliced into 200,000 squares and the brightness of each one was measured. This data was organised in a spreadsheet, which was used to output a track for the pen to follow, where light areas were drawn using a flat line, and darker areas were drawn using an increasingly extreme wobble, such that the pen moved up and down furthest from the centre line at the darkest parts of the image.
Processing the image took around an hour using an algorithm I’d written myself. Plotting it took about six hours.
Material: Pilot rollerball on paper
Equipment used: Pen plotter; Raspberry Pi single board computer; Inkscape software for plotting; Affinity Designer to draw lines; LibreOffice Calc to organise data
Size: A1
