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Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI (muffinman.io)

90 points by stankot ↗ HN
Hey HN,

I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool.

It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me.

The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know.

Cheers!

28 comments

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nmoya
Amazing work! Thanks for sharing
rossant
Great outcome and write up, thanks for sharing!
jimmcslim
Curious to know what pen plotter was used here… didn’t look like article mentioned it.

I’m a big fan of Dan Catt and his work with generative art and pen plotting.

jfim
The author mentioned that the maker of their pen plotter is evil mad scientist, so it's likely they're using the AxiDraw
stankot
That is correct. I use AxiDraw SE/A3 and I love it. One of the best purchases I ever made.
jfim
Super cool and it looks fantastic!

I've been wanting to do something with a plotter, thanks for the tip about center line tracing

tobr
Looks like a fun project. I would love to get into pen plotting someday.

Have to say the text bothers and intrigues me… digital fonts that try to look like handwriting are already in the uncanny valley, and then you loop it back into physical media with a pen plotter. It could almost be an art project in its own right, exploring layers of going back and forth between physical and digital media to produce a seemingly mundane paper with some writing on it.

stankot
For me, pen plotting is a lot of fun. There is something so satisfying in bringing digital work to the physical world.

As for the text, I have it on my todo list to create a few single line fonts, for some time now. The obvious one is my own handwriting, ideally with some randomness built in. I would like others to be less conventional to sprinkle them in my drawings, or like you mentioned, to create some pieces that are text only.

maaaaattttt
I remember once seeing a presentation about someone making extensive use of ligatures to create a very realistic hand writing effect. I think it was that an "e", for example, would always look different depending on the preceding letter, even though it was not a real ligature case per say. It's a huge amount of work but I remember the results being very convincing.
bambax
Excellent project, congrats!

About the cleaning up phase: the author cleaned up the bitmaps before the vectorizing stage, and that included separating lines.

In my experience it's a little bit easier to clean the vectorized results by removing unwanted points, because those are easier to see than line connections that may or may not pose a problem later. (But to each their own.)

stankot
Actually that's my usual approach, but you should see the vector output from these. I tried doing it and than went back to cleaning up the raster images.
imranq
Love it - I wonder if you could create a animation book this way cheaply, see a moving image as you flip through it
aredox
You're in luck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918902
imranq
Amazing, this is why I visit HN :D

Combining the two ideas, "hand drawn" animation flip books could be neat. Start with a video, convert frames to a drawable vector, draw each frame with a pen plotter, assemble the flip book

stankot
Sure, I think the hard part is creating hand drawn animation. If you can draw or generate it, the rest is fairly straight forward.

I have an idea for somewhat different flip animation, stay tuned :)

WhyOhWhyQ
I just can't enjoy art anymore in this brave new world.
delbronski
Great work! Recraft V3 does very good vector images. I wonder if you could use the SVG the model outputs directly in the plotter. Would save you a lot of time.
chrismorgan
I haven’t used it personally, but examining some in https://www.recraft.ai/community?imageParentType=vector_illu..., I presume they’re producing raster images, and then auto-tracing. I looked at a few of the line-art samples they had there, and https://img.recraft.ai/--CWuHOOd2OaTTKRrIUsA-2nRJt-52M8NnXRt... has all kinds of artefacts that are just like autotracing tends to produce.

For use on a plotter, the line art specifically needs to be a stroked path, rather than a filled path, and so for tracing you need centreline tracing, as discussed in the article. So you probably get absolutely no benefit from taking SVG—you’d need to turn them back into raster and trace them properly.

flarzzarp
Lovely project! A little trick against the smudging with some paper is to apply a thin layer of hairspray to the page after plotting/printing and then letting it dry for a bit. We do this for riso prints at our universities printshop. Should work just the same with pen plots.
stankot
Thanks for the tip! Does it make paper shiny and stiff?