One possible way through the desire for thin lines would be to have a mask screen with a tiny hole in it. It would get quickly clogged of course, but you could have absorbent stuff wicking the ink away or some thing like many belt sanders continually providing new and fresh 4 sided masks.
Also a variety between crisp and blown lines would definately be pictorially interesting.

I hope you’ll keep showing us examples of your progress, as it’s pretty fascinating to watch. Good luck!

“Jim” would be ‘better’ if the left two thirds of him were cut off, I suppose, but it STILL wouldn’t be very engaging from a distance. I really do LIKE the saturated colors and the zillion variations on the theme of diamonds, squares, etc, but I DON’T like the fuzziness of the sprayed lines – I want them to be super-sharp and clear (not fuzzy)… AND I want the image as a whole (viewed from a distance) to be as strong as the layers of little parts which produce it…

This “Jim” painting doesn’t come close (as Annie said — and I said the same thing myself — it looks like my inkjet is having ink cartridge problems — that’s actually pretty close to ‘true’) so I’m hoping that after some more months of TOTAL CRAP I’m able to produce painted work which approaches the level of my recent pen and ink drawings — which I feel are far and away the best stuff I’ve produced so far (kids not included)…

I like Tom’s idea of hiring a mistake-maker. I’m available, and I make excellent mistakes, if I do say so myself.

Thanks for showing this. It’s fabulous!

To err is human…right? There’s probably no point trying to convince you that the mistakes are good, but I do like the painting as it is. I like that you have reinvented the pixel. The choice of your “gestures” make the image beautifully Lyonesque. I like seeing the beauty of these nicely executed patches against the streaky areas. For me this is the first time that the struggle with the machine has bought an added poetic element. When carved blocks screw up they add nothing, likewise when the pen runs out of ink.

Of course I now expect you will produce near perfect paintings, but perhaps you could allow for some mistakes? Which raises the question of how a mistake is made. If it is deliberate is it a “real” mistake? Who wears the mistake, the artist, the subject, the viewer, or the machine?

Perhaps you are incapable of making mistakes? Could you delegate mistakes to another party? Surely you could hire an apprentice mistake maker?

Keep going, good stuff ahead.

As an aside, this is worth a look if you haven’t seen it:

http://www.hektor.ch/

A reminder that your rig is not constrained to “pixels”.

About clogging…

Hi, Tom… The airbrush clogging has been mostly resolved now by a) starting with a CLEAN airbrush and b) carefully filtering the ink through a very fine filter paper prior to loading the airbrush. I hope in a week or so to eliminate the problem by using a color formulated for airbrush (currently I’m just using pigmented ink optimized for pens, not airbrushes… I hope that’ll do the trick – the new colors are advertised as “non-clogging” and are also lightfast pigments, so we’ll see… But I am now getting better results and running up to about 15 hours although the line still seems to deform a bit over time… The way the brush works, the paint is sucked by venture into a TINY little cone shaped nozzle with the tip cut off – it’s less than 1/64th inch hole and shallow cone (long and acute angle). A ‘needle’ of the same geometry screws down into this funnel (cone) – when it’s screwed all the way down, it’s a closed valve and no paint can pass – as it’s unscrewed, a tiny passage is formed all the way around and paint can flow – as you continue to unscrew, the passage widens and more paint flows. To make very thin lines, the passage is MINUTE and easy to stop up – which is what still eventually seems to happen. By lowering the air pressure, I can open the valve a bit wider and avoid clogging a bit longer, but this also generates some spatter… So we’ll have to see what happens with the new colors next week!

Thanks for the suggestion! By the way, I’m using an IWATA Revolution SAR (single action airbrush) – I totally admire the precision engineering of this gun – very tiny and very well machined parts, easy to disassemble and clean, and seems reliable and logical – WAY better than anything I can engineer and I have NO way to machine stuff to these close tolerances and small sizes at all! Plus I haven’t been struck by any way to improve the thing – it’s quite ingenious and straight forward and… Well, just very damned cool!