A while ago I ended up at Mike Lyon's site and saw images of an ink pen attached to a CNC milling machine. This is a machine with which you can mill computer-controlled shapes from sheet material. The mill follows coordinates in X and Y direction and raises upwards (Z direction) to move the mill in and out of the wood.

There are lots of interesting experiments to be carried out with this technique by using a pen or brush instead of the mill so that it becomes a kind of plotter. I know that there are fine inkjet printers nowadays but they are too small in size (large is expensive) and too little painterly. And I had already built a CNC milling machine with the great help of Ryan Zellars and his site V1 Engineering. That's how I got started.

The biggest obstacle turned out to be making a suitable image and converting it into the code that the machine can use. The software is of course tuned to the cutting or milling of wood. But with a bit of puzzling, the right programs and information on the internet you can come far.

A separate file is created per colour and since the machine is quite slow, a 3-colour print of 40 x 60 cm (approx. 15.7 x 23.6 inch) will take a few hours. But it is an addictive activity and the results are encouraging.