My first efforts to make medium scale paintings on paper using acrylic paint pens in a special jig I designed and built for the purpose.
The paint pens I chose are made by Molotow and have a fibrous tip that is charged and recharged by pushing the tip into the body of the pen and releasing. The pens are very reliable and produce a consistent mark, but the paint charge must be recharged by pushing the tip into the body of the pen to allow paint to flow into the tip. This must be done every several feet of painting or the paint pen will run dry.
I wrote some special code into my spiral drawing program to allow me to set up the pen recharging and insert recharge instructions into the code to produce the paintings as I generated it. I experimented with various parameters, painting directly onto the paper, or preparing the paper with an acrylic ground prior to painting the image. These paintings are mostly conceived in layers, each layer built from ’tiled’ square spirals constructed so the ‘tightness’ of the spiral was related to the average value of the reference image in the corresponding area.
The results were interesting enough and led me to make more paintings on this scale…
