Using Edit > Select Same > Fill and Stroke or Fill Color or any of the other options wouldn’t work as it would also end up selecting the lines.

The hacky code that I made produced the desired lines but also it had lots of additional single-node paths/dots at the start of each line. Thanks to a pen holder adaptor I can replace the vinyl cutting blades with a pen and turn the vinyl cutter into a plotter 🙂īack to the Processing sketch. When using this great Inkscape plugin I can bypass Silhouette’s proprietary software and send artwork directly to the cutter from Inkscape. In the past, plotters were used in applications such as computer-aided design, as they were able to produce line drawings much faster and of a higher quality than contemporary conventional printers, and small desktop plotters were often used for business graphics.Īt home I have a Silhouette Cameo 2 vinyl cutter. Plotters draw pictures on paper using a pen.

The plotter is a computer printer for printing vector graphics. For this I will copy from the Wikipedia article on plotters: I produced a very hacky workaround (with help from Ben Neal) which “works” but produces a few unwanted artefacts.īefore I go on I should probably explain what a plotter is as the unwanted artefacts relate to it. Unfortunately for me if I were to implement this as is suggested in the help file it would export both the drawn line and the background video as a still frame. Fortunately Processing already has functions for exporting to SVGs. The next stage was to export those drawn lines to SVGs (or PDFs) so that I could export them to Inkscape and then a plotter. It would draw these lines, creating new lines (instead of adding to an existing line) at each major turn and giving them a unique colour. The make the video element I hacked together a couple of Processing scripts that did basic motion tracking by following a user-specified colour. Making A Perfect Circle presented me with a few challenges. It consists of a video and accompanying plotter drawings. The piece is about how we interface with computers that analyse our activities. For the AlgoMech 2019 festival in June I created a new performative drawing piece, A Perfect Circle.

Inkscape drawings time lapse