Further adventures in mark making

As this project has led me to experiment with mark making and drawing machines I played around briefly with a hexagonal shaped thing after the fashion of a spirograph... the idea will work it just needs refinement, and a proper design which I may or may not get to for this... we shall see what time brings. a bit of fun noe the less and an excuse to play with hexagons, my favourite shape.

the wire was to hold the pencil in placeas I turned the small hexagon.

 I think it needs solid various sized inner hexagons with holes at various points, like a spirograph and teeth on the outside of them and the inside of the large one.

More experiments with mark making devices

So while I am developing some drawing machines and devices that one must actively participate with I thought hey.... what if I could design something that does not rely on this but only achieves its goal through air displacement? I experimented with suspending various drawing materials from the rafter thingy over my desk

Charcoal, pencil and graphite

  

tied charcoal to a graphite pencil to add weight

What I found here was that the charcoal left a better line, graphite moved better as it was heavier and the pencil just did not join in at all.

Then I tried compressed coloured charcoal and tying weights to the charcoals, putting little flaggy things on the strings to catch the air and all sorts of serious science like that.

I guess the area my desk is does not catch enough air so not much happened.

I just moved the stick back and forth to get marks and see what level of movement was required.... I got this lovely drawing!

aforementioned lovely drawing

 I then thought I had better move the whole thing to a more breezy location so I came up with a contraption and started hanging more drawing things from it.... now at this point the people around me most assuredly questioned my sanity... once again! Oh how I laughed.

 Now, with nothing to catch the air and no real air movement to speak of not a great deal occured here.... I wracked my brains for a full minute and a half and came up with the GENIUS idea of attaching some balloons to the set up... again the sanity questioning occured, again I laughed...

Yes, serious art in progress here. Well... the idea was sound enough but these particular balloons are very dense therefore not really moving around as much as I would have liked. I resolved to buy lighter ones and do this over again the next day.

Lighter ones the next day.

This worked a lot better and more marks were made on the paper. I then moved it by the back door to avail myself of the gale force winds and had a great success!! Once it started raining I thought it would be fun to use watercolour pencils and see what happens there, just need a spray bottle and a fan.....

If you could just see this in motion, ( I will do a video) balloons and charcoals flapping about...you would laugh also.

So this is where I am with this ongoing experiment, lets see what next week brings eh!!

What I have been working on, drawing machines

Well, it has been a while since my last post and update, too long.... but I have been working on a load of stuf, I have been drawn to (pardon the pun) and experimenting with drawing machines. One direction I wanted to take was to to strip the process back to as basic a function as possibleand see what could be achieved with minimal external influence.

I have designed and created a piece I call "Octo-Sketch" (patent pending btw)

and have made up and tested a model of it, it is a load of fun and something I am working on developing further. The idea here is to have multiple participants interacting with the machine all at once. The quality of output is not important, what matters here is how the different participants interact and what sort of interplay comes of it.

I plan to produce it from clear perspex on the laser cutter and present it packaged as a game in a board game box. I wanted to have some fun with this project and this is a good way, I think.

Contraption number 2

 So the maquette for my second contraption came out today, this is a 4 cog version ( no point making all 7 or 8, the idea works and besides, it nearly killed my still recovering shoulder), the final will be a freestanding situation,

possibly with6 maybe 7x 20 inch cogs, these are 10 and will be an offset skewiff type thing with the centre cog driven by a handle resembling bike pedals. I thought about mounting it on a shovel or broom or something but that won't work so it would have to be a purpose built "wobbly stick" thing with a broom or shovel head on the bottom.. for a bit of fun.I'm thinking the top one should be the image viewer with the acetates and a projection light but I am not sure, I think really these contraptions should stay as they are.. a bit of purposeless, harmless pedal powered fun.

I like it, I am feeling more confident about the project in general and looking forward to putting these contraptions together as well as working on the others I want to do. I have looked at people like Arthur Ganson's contraptions and some Rube Goldberg machines for inspiration, well I say that but I have already been making these and then came across this stuff, great to make and I hope, fun in an exhibition setting.