The Lion's Rear

Now that I am Back on to the Plotter Train with vsketch , I am making some nice little Generative Art . This page will catalog my creative endeavors with the AxiDraw and related software packages. These look so much better in person, roam:You Should ask me to see them.

This page will be updated regularly with my work and has a feed to go with it if you're so inclined to see when I post new art on the page: https://thelionsrear.com/plotter-art.xml

Took a photo of this classic Fairlady Z in Seattle in April 2021 and plotted it in April 2026. This was a CMYK process, I'm producing more of these each from a unique seed of the same DrawingBot configuration.

it pairs nicely with this not-so-classic not-so-Datsun Z

Last year I did this plot of the IMSA GT Porsche 935 in a beige Apple Computers livery. I love how the only color in the photo is the rainbow.

This year's IMSA race in Laguna Seca featured a handful of throwback liveries, including a Porsche 936 done up in the same livery. I'm not quite happy with this plot and the color choices but this pairing is really fun.

with some perlin noise.

ongoing

On 2 May 2026 we re-opened the Eugene Maker Space . The Eugene SLUG Queen made an appearance and provided a grand-opening benediction, which I committed to paper on in June 2026:

Oh radiant tinkers! Grease stained philosophers! Children of yarn, sawdust and vibes!

We gather in this temple of "I wonder what would happen if" ... where curiosity is currency and failure is just part of the prototype's back story.

Bless this makerspace! This castle of clamps this disco of tangled cords! This feral sanctuary where perhaps a sewing machine and a soldering iron could fall in love and produce a piece of wearable art can sit down in.

We honor the sacred covenant of the shared shop. Let this place where beginners are welcomed and experts remember what it felt like to be confused. May questions be asked boldly and knowledge be offered freely. May every tool be not exactly where you left it, but exactly where someone needs it.

We bless the hands that maintain these tools, the minds that share the skills, the hearts that keep the space weird, warm and wildly collaborative.

May you see possiblity where others see trash. May you turn problems in to projects. May you reject straight lines when a wiggle will do.

May you be dazzled with reckless and righteous abandon. Go now noble makers, build boldly, fail fabulously, and leave just enough glitter behind to let us know you were here.

All hail makers! All hail stuff that gets made! And all hail the slow unstoppable use of creativity!

The camera doesn't really do this one justice, it's so tactile, and the contrast is perhaps too high.

The Nissan 160J won the Kenya Safari Rally four times but here it is at home in Japan alongside its badge-siblings the Nissan Violet and the Datsun 510.

art of rally is just such a good game. I fire it up sometimes still just to scream through Sardinia or crash in to a tree in Finland. I have a whole gallery of my favorite photos from my first play-through, and have been going through it looking for things suitable to feed to DrawingBot .

This piece shows das whip, an artist's interpretation of an BMW M3 hurling itself in to the air over a crest. I really liked this shot, because you can see that the car at the last second was thrown in the direction it needed to be facing when it landed, so from straight behind you get a neat 3/4 profile of the car.

DrawingBot has a really nice edge-detection mode which I used to punch up the details on the car and the roadway. It's way better than Inkscape's Trace Bitmap functionality which always requires a fair bit of cleanup. That is layered with a line hatching that is random but biased toward the same angle so you get some nice hatching in the sky, though it's sort of lost on the tarmac.

I need to understand how to make the colors pop a bit more, still. Even with the source image's contrast pulled way up and certain elements enhanced in the roam:Gnu's Not Unix Image Manipulation Program , you can see that the thing that really stands out the most image is the sky, when the car itself is blue and red and white and pops a lot more in the original.

Come back to my AxiDraw and DrawingBot with this photo I took on the 2021 Metris Camper Trip a few hours before I almost got the van stuck in the Quilomene wilderness miles from cell service.

I'm a bit out of practice, my pens are a bit worn, but this stuff is still real fun. I need to go take more photos around Eugene and Oregon and the world, and put them to paper.

Once, Chao Chou asked a monk, “Have you been here before?” The monk responded, “Yes, I have.” Chao Chou said, “Have a cup of tea.” Later, Chao Chou asked another monk, “Have you been here before?” The monk replied, “No, I haven’t.” Chao Chou said, “Have a cup of tea.”

The head monk of the temple had been observing this, and said to Chao Chou, “Whenever Your Reverence asks a monk, ‘Have you been here before?’ whether they say ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ you say, ‘Have a cup of tea.’ What’s the meaning of this?” Chao Chou answered, “Head monk! Have a cup of tea.”

A series of four prints done of the hanzi character for Tea . I will hang one of these in my tea room, and possibly gift the others to tea-loving friends. This was an experiment in making "brush stroke" patterns, and it's not quite the effect I would like but it is nice and simple and I really love some of the close in details of the final prints.

The green one was done with Pilot V5 pens, the others with Pilot G2 pens. I do really like both options, the "kinetic" nature of the G2 pens flowing less freely than the V5 pens gives the works all a very unique feeling, and some of the shading which happens as a result is a bit mesmerizing up close. I think it's really interesting that some of the prints failed to take ink in the same places, I'm not sure what to make of that (the fifth stroke in particular of the orange and dark-green ones)

The ensō is a form in Zen calligraphy meant to be performed in one uninhibited brush stroke as a representative form of pure, wise, creativity.

In this case, it was the first thing I got working in vsketch and it is not a single stroke, but 360 lines creating a flowing bezier cloth wrapping back on itself creating some really interesting moire and shading effects. The effect is from a distance indistinguishable but up close you can see how far from absolute enlightenment I still am.