The Evil Mad Scientist WaterColorBot
Wed, 01 Jan 2014
I've been using some of my time off this holiday season to put together a few projects that I've had ready and waiting in the studio. One of these was - to give it it's full name - the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory and Super Awesome Sylvia WaterColorBot.
This Kickstarter-funded project from www.evilmadscientist.com is basically a 2D plotter that holds a watercolour brush instead of a pen. It comes in kit form and took me a couple of hours to put together. It takes standard watercolour paper and the popular (and cheap) Crayola watercolour paint set. With a bit of clever programming (and a few water resevoirs) the machine is able to produce actual watercolour paintings based on live user control or standard PNG graphic files.
Now that I've had a bit of time to play with it I have to say I'm really impressed. The idea for the machine apparently came from Super Awesome Sylvia - a young girl in the US who is into making/hacking - and it's definitely something that young people will want to play with. It also looks great.
I particularly like the way you can run off multiple copies of a painting and that, despite following the same set of commands, every painting is slightly different. This is due to differences in how the paint sits on the brush and the small amounts of slack in the mechanism. It makes a nice contrast to the carbon-copy 'perfection' expected in most modern printing devices.
The machine is also very hackable, with expectation that owners will try different painting and drawing implements with it and write their own software (everything is open source and examples of code are available). I've already seen examples of people using marker pens with the WaterColorBot to good effect.
I plan to move my WaterColorBot to Interact Labs at Phoenix in a few weeks time. Come along to the next Digital Makers Group meeting on the 18th January 2014 if you want to have a go at making your own paintings with it. See a short video of the 'bot in action here and some pictures of it here.
