Last days, was shining and I made some more experiments with the spray paint plotter at the park - this time with input of the local graffiti community. That’s a thread.
#plottertwitter #graffiti #urbanart #streetart #color #spraypaint

One suggestion was to try out a rastered 4-color plot with transparent paint. I had no idea that transparent spray paint exists! Turns out that Belton’s SCHOCKBLAU / MELONENGELB / TELEMAGENTA / TOAST SIGNALSCHWARZ pretty much match CMYK.

Using Konrad Zuse instead of Lenna as a test image caused a bit of confusion. No one understood why I’d plot Erich Honecker’s face over and over again. A hot tip was to write Konrad’s name below the picture :)

An interesting discovery was, that the portrait is much clearer on the smartphone display.

Aram wanted to hear the machine. So that one is for you, @arambartholl! There will certainly follow a longer video, when I publish the documentation on my website. You can also find another short video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/COSLW7ooqJL/ 

BTW.: I’m very much aware that my aesthetic preferences (when it comes to painting over existing artworks) challenge informal rules of the global graffiti community. We’re also discussing culture & codes here and being a total graffiti n00b, I’m learning a lot.

EFCIS and PLANET256 gave there friendly permission to partially paint over their artworks. I couldn’t find EFCIS on the web, but please enjoy more of PLANET’s stunning works on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodtimes256/ 

#Funfact: Did you know that cordless drills use planetary gears? Zuse‘s Graphomat Z64 also worked with DC motors and a planetary gear set. They were super sophisticated though, as they could run in 16 different speeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicyclic_gearing

On Wednesday, I wanted to do some more experiments, this time with different caps. The entire wall was already occupied but some of the artists asked me to bring the machine anyway as there were ~2 square meters left where no one was painting yet.

The dark vertical background lines were sprayed with a fat cap, the diagonal lines were painted with a skinny cap.

Here’s the entire piece. Vectors came from me, colors were chosen together with the local graffiti artists. I guess it’s also official now, that the machine will be named “Graffomat”.

After seeing the machine running, HOWTOKILLAGRAFFITI and DANK1 wanted to experiment themselves with the plotter. Check out their profiles on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/howtokillagraffiti/ https://www.instagram.com/dank_osk/ 

During the spontaneous collaboration we got some really good ideas for the next firmware version. I’ll tell you about them once they are implemented. There’s still a lot of stuff which can be improved!

But for the moment, I’ll leave you with a few more photos.

If you want to “own” those pictures – you can download them all (and many more) in hires from my photo diary: https://www.niklasroy.com/diary/  They are published under an open license. No #NFT required ;)

If you you want to support this project and the local artists, feel free to send me $$$. My Paypal is linked to my Email address, which you can find on my website. If some cash arrives, I’ll go and buy cans for everyone with it.

So that’s now really the last pic. Big thanks to all the local graffiti artists for sharing the wall, ideas and obscure knowledge with me! Please enjoy their Instagram profiles and have a nice weekend :)

[Sorry - I had to delete some tweets and to reupload them as Twitter wasn't showing this thread as a thread]