Plotting

How much detail can you produce using the fewest possible lines? That’s the question I try to answer with my plotted portraits. Each of these is produced using either an A1 or an A3 plotter driven by a Raspberry Pi single board computer, using Bic Biros or fountain pens.

In many cases, I’ve produced the images by calculating the relative brightness of a series of points across the surface of an image, then used a self-coded spreadsheet to arrange hand-drawn spirals of different intensities to reproduce those levels. Each spiral is carefully drawn so its tail touches the head of the next, the result of which is a portrait produced using a single, unbroken line. These can each take up to 80 hours to plot.

Click through to each image to read more detail about how it was produced.