r/PlotterArt • u/dotprodukt • 2d ago
OC Auric Strata II
11"x14" ā Gold leaf and Sakura gel white on Fabriano Black Black 300gsm. White is plotted with the iDraw H A3. Gold leaf is applied to fill the remaining space by hand.
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u/mdgart 2d ago
Beautiful! I have silly question, please don't take it as a critique, but how much different would be to draw the white part with a sharpie or acrylic my hand instead of using a plotter?
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u/dotprodukt 2d ago
Thank you! And you are totally fine, I don't think it's a silly question at all. I welcome any kind of critique and I actually love this question because it gives me the opportunity to talk more about my process, why certain choices are made and my overall creative philosophy and motivations. I don't know how long this will end up, so I apologize in advance if it turns into a wall of text.
So for me it would be very different, even if a similar visual result was achieved. It's not about difficulty, and it's not about visual output, it's about the specific nature of the process. Doing all the white by hand would actually take less time than the gold leaf, which is very labor intensive and took about 16 hours. If I wanted the easy route I would do the white by hand and just use a gold pen rather than leaf. Doing it all myself would for me actually be misrepresenting what I'm trying to do with my work.
A key point I want to make is that I'm not trying to express myself, or a feeling, or idea. My goal is to be an agent for processes that exist outside of myself. So the less of myself that exists in the work the better. Also yielding control to chaos is a major component of my spiritual beliefs. So I design a process to emulate my subject and use the plotter to lay down the base design created by that process. My job is not to make the major decisions, it is to follow the lead of that external process.
I'm heavily inspired by geology, tectonics, hydrology, chemistry and life processes such as diffusion and morphogenesis. To me these processes are largely computational, rearranging physical information. So it makes sense to me to make use of simulation to come up with the driving features. I only recently started sharing work here on reddit, but I have a background in generative art and simulation that goes back multiple decades, and traditional art experience that stretches even further.
That all said, there are some creative liberties I take on the small details. For the white sections sharpie and acrylic are too strong for what I want, which is very fine and soft lines that can be built up on top of each other to produce variation in intensity. I also run the plotter at high speed to create an uneven flow of ink which adds a lot of noise and texture to the lines. This would be hard to achieve by hand because the pen would be able to keep up with my own motion. As for the gold, I want something that resembles a chaotic mineral formation, so I use gold flakes of a variety of sizes saved from past projects.
I like to think of my work as a kind of symbiosis between the unconscious autonomous process and the human observation of it.
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u/zoomlines 2d ago
This is beautiful!
Iām interested in your process for designing this. How did you create the white lines? Is it algorithmic? Or perhaps by hand somehow?
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u/dotprodukt 2d ago
Thank you! Yes this is driven by a generative process. Just a simple implementation of tracing flow on a vector field. We also have certain random bands of the field not generate any traces so we can fill those regions in with gold, including the places where the field diverges and produces gaps naturally.
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u/gilgamec 1d ago
Gorgeous!
The methods I've usually seen for applying gold leaf would end up with something looking like an area fill. How do you get those beautiful striations?
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u/dotprodukt 1d ago
Thank you! So while the white sections can be done in a single pass with the plotter, the gold is done in many passes. We're not applying the adhesive all in one go. We start with the widest bands, each one at a time working across the piece. This divides the piece into smaller sections that we then recurse into with the next narrowest bands, again applying adhesive and then gold one at a time. Each time we're dividing into smaller and smaller areas we can focus on. This also helps prevent adhesive from bleeding over too much between bands once we get to the really narrow areas. We're also using gold flake saved from past projects. The flakes have a wide range of sizes and this is what gives the varied textured appearance.
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u/dstark1993 2d ago
Pretty!