Sometimes we manage to miss projects when they first appear, only to have the joy of discovering them a while later. So it is with [John Opsahl]’s Project Convert To Paint, a CNC painting ‘bot that takes a bitmap image and paints it on canvas as a fine artist would, with a real brush, and paints.

It was first created for the 2017 robotart.org competition, and takes the form of a fairly standard CNC gantry machine. It departs from the norm in its chuck however, as it has what is described as a universal artist chuck, capable of holding a variety of artistic implements. The images are converted from bitmap to vector format, and thence to gcode with the help of a bit of custom Python code.

He’s at pains to say that simply because an image can be converted to a paintable format does not mean that it will produce a good picture. But some of the results are rather impressive, delivering anything from a pointilist effect to a broader brush stroke. We can see that with a bit of experience in the processing it would be possible to create a veritable gallery of masterpieces.

We may have missed this one the first time, but we did catch another drawbot from the same competition.