Here’s a ‘revisit’ to an approach I was very interested in a decade or more ago — black line over color — inspired by Hiroshige and other ukiyo-e artists (and the comic books I loved during my childhood)…

1996 monotypes with black ink over flat color areas my wife, Linda and a self-portrait
each image about 16 x 11 inches

I designed the image to include three flat colors, pink, blue, and tan to be painted in watercolor and then overlaid with the squiggly cross-hatched line drawing I’ve been developing over the past several years. I mounted a pencil in the gizmo I invented to carry my ink-pens and drew the color area outlines, then painted them very loosely with watercolor washes, using frisket to mask the outlines. Then mounted pen(s) and drew the image as usual.

I think the color turned out to be very effective, in spite of nasty technical problems caused mainly by uneven dampening of the paper during painting. That caused some expansion in the large sheet of Arches 300 lb. hot press watercolor paper which didn’t completely shrink upon drying and left a half dozen large wrinkles which have persisted into the finished piece. Later this morning I’ll lay the paper down flat, dampen it carefully (my inks are all water borne and very resoluble, so I’ll have to be careful not to ruin the drawing after several hundred hours of work, and then see whether I can press the paper back to flat with a hot iron.

Another nasty technical problem was caused by the frisking FRISKET!! Wouldn’t you imagine that a product designed to be used on watercolor paper for masking would be non-staining?!? I used a frisket recommended by my local Dick Blick — their house brand, same stuff as Windsor Newton (which I’ve found also stains the paper) — but it left a dull reddish-brown ‘halo’ wherever I applied it! UGH! Blick carries a WHITE frisket which I hope (next time) will be non-staining! Very disappointing!

I suppose I could’a figured this out in advance, but it seemed to me that coffee or tea stained paper would make a good first trial image and clean-up would be very easy… WRONG! WHAT A MESS!

So viscosity about like cream works quite well.

I removed the little paint-pot which came with the flow pencil and replaced it with a water bottle I’d modified for the purpose. The cap has the paint outlet mounted in it and I mounted a vacuum-relief/pressure port (to force more viscous paint to flow using a bit of air pressure) on the side (a tube runs to the ‘bottom’ of the bottle so air can get in). This allows me to fill the bottle with paint (or whatever) without making a mess, mount the cap, and connect the hose to the pen before inverting the bottle and allowing paint to flow. Works well.

Because the pen doesn’t have many parallel surfaces — it’s all cones and curves and joints, it wasn’t easy to conceive a way to hold and actuate it. In the end I decided to make it easier for me to construct the gizmo and so I made it to kinda work backwards (power-off allows paint to flow — so when it stops, paint keeps running). A single solenoid both lifts the pen off the paper and releases the trigger, stopping the ink flow while the pen is moved to a new painting location. When the solenoid is ‘off’, a spring pushes the pen down onto the paper or canvas and actuates the trigger at the same time.

The paper surface on my 2nd attempt is now badly abraded with ‘fuzz-balls’ all over the surface in the darkest areas — next attempt I’ll use a heavily sized paper and adjust the height of the flow-pencil so it JUST BARELY TOUCHES THE PAPER!

I’m VERY excited about the possibilities for color work, both directly (painting flat areas of transparent color), and especially indirectly (using weighted gestures again) since the flow-pencil produces a VERY sharp-edged line — much cleaner edge than my airbrush!

Computer controlled paintbrush gizmo up and running as of 30 minutes ago!!!

Parts for airbrush assembly – the airbrush itself is just above the angle iron with the solenoid already installed. Solenoid plunger above it, little bent aluminum airbrush retaining clips above airbrush – the angle iron gets bolted into the aluminum pipe and holds the airbrush vertically in the center of the pipe – the plastic pipe shims the assembly out to proper dimension for my holder… Ink/paint bottle at left and “Z” clip to keep the plunger from falling out is next to plunger – it’s a damned simple solution given how long it’s taken me to figure out!

Parts for airbrush assembly – the airbrush itself is just above the angle iron with the solenoid already installed. Solenoid plunger above it, little bent aluminum airbrush retaining clips above airbrush – the angle iron gets bolted into the aluminum pipe and holds the airbrush vertically in the center of the pipe – the plastic pipe shims the assembly out to proper dimension for my holder… Ink/paint bottle at left and “Z” clip to keep the plunger from falling out is next to plunger – it’s a damned simple solution given how long it’s taken me to figure out!

The new paintbrush assembly almost ready for installation!

The completed assembly (minus ink bottle) is mounted in machine – the interface board came from ShopBot – it’s very simple board with five relays driven from program controlled outputs in the ShopBot controller (the ribbon cable you see accordion-folded runs from top of the board over the cable umbilical of the machine and into the main ShopBot control box… I use only one of the relays (and 24v power from the controller) to energize and deenergize my little solenoid which pushes the button on the airbrush…

I mounted the relay board onto the Z-axis of the ShopBot in a little plexi box I built this afternoon – the box should keep the board clean when I’m routing instead of painting… The cover is open at the bottom and just slides down over the plexi back in some nicely fitted grooves in the sides of the cover. You can see the brush assembly mounted into the machine at the bottom of this photo.

Here’s a view of the business-end of the assembly neatly mounted in the machine

The air hose has a quick-release at each end so it’ll be a snap to change over from painting to drawing to routing – but I’m going to need to build a 2nd generation drawing control to fit the relay board the same way and using a 24v continuous duty solenoid which I now have on hand instead of the intermittent duty 110v solenoid I used for the previous two drawings (and melted one of the coils in the process, unfortunately – that won’t happen again once I’ve converted over to the 24v device – and I won’t have to worry about 110v finding its way into the delicate electronics (or my delicate body, either)…

You can see the 24v solenoid wires (white wires) about 1/3 up from bottom left, and solenoid plunger on button of airbrush and black air hose coming in from right… Since it works in reverse of pen-lifter, I have to program a new converter before I can use it (the pen solenoid got powered when it was to STOP drawing – the brush gets powered when it is to PAINT, so my old program is reversed and I need to make a simple change in order to generate the proper code for the new airbrush… Should be testing with actual paint tomorrow!!! YIPPEE!!! But… The thing does actually WORK right now, the computer turning the airbrush off and on with command, so I’m ready to go!!!

January 24, 2007:

Yesterday and today I’ve been experimenting with the new computer controlled painting device and the results are encouraging — a few interesting problems (maybe these will turn out to be ‘characteristics’) which I hope to resolve, but — well, see for yourself (about 1 minute movie):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttc3Fd8akhA

dilute India ink spiral test with my finger for scale

concentric circles with splashes

concentric circle tests overlapped