Here’s the final printer I built with Artmatr, follow along to see how we got there….

We build our first printer off of a modified X-Carve gantry. It was monocolor, had a huge vacuum tank hanging in the back, and used a Toshiba CF1 Inkjet. I got covered in ink almost every day wrestling with the machine… those were the days.

Here I took 6 wood panels and printed a full image onto the arrangement. Artmatr’s custom printing software allowed me to collage a number of component images into a single print. similar to filling up a 3D printer bed with all the parts in an assembly.

Artist and inventor Jeff Leonard built this rover before my time at Artmatr, but previously it featured a paintbrush. We reconfigured the machine to use an inkjet, and were able to produce some incredible life size figures in collaboration with artist Raghava K.K.

Printing allows the artist to rework an image over and over, exploring its many branching possibilities rather than being stuck with a single iteration.

Sozo afforded a scale which held great appeal to professional artists. Here Artmatr worked with Maria Kreyn in exploration of how printing could play a role in her work.

To iterate further on the design of the machine while still keeping X1 in use, we developed our second printer, X2. It major goal was to enable multicolor printing, yet utilize only one inkjet. This is a major departure from conventional color printers, which typically use 4 or more inkjets, one for each CMYK color channel. We saw a potential in being able to mix pigments in the reservoir, thus printing “spot color”, rather than dithering on the page.

In attempting a CMYK print, we tried to reproduce the Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens. This was a painstaking process, both in image preparation, and in changing the inks between each layer. To make this rudimentary print it took over an hour of mostly manual tasks.

The growing complexity of X2 made us re-evaluate the direction of the design. We had essentially been angling towards the re-engineering of existing industrial printing technology, but trying to do it with < .001% of the resources of Hewlett Packard. It just wasn’t worth it to take that approach for now, so we had to distill what was essential in the printing technology we were creating. We decided to create a simple, self-contained inkjet system which could change inks relatively easily, and be mounted on an arbitrary motion platform.

This is what we hacked together, its pretty much the whole inkjet system, but getting it to output something decent was a little like trying to fix an airplane while flying it…

Here’s our self-contained inkjet system mounted on an Industrial Robot Arm. Check it out. Learn more about Haploid, where they’re taming industrial robotics for art.

Back to gantries. We wanted to make larger paintings, so we took X1 and mounted it on top of a larger 4’ x 8’ wooden gantry. This allowed us to slide big paintings underneath it, but created the new challenge of stitching together pieces of larger work. Here we attempt to print a horse into a painting by Barnaby Furnas

Layer printing worked well for certain graphic styles. I found it similar to a screen-printer in this poster I made for a friend.

The printer was also able to produce unique effects which weren’t otherwise possible, exemplified by these blended gradients.

It was time to make a bigger printer, and clean it up too. I focused on creating a new design for the printer which would be about 2x larger, more robust, and generally more user friendly.

Here’s our third printer, X3.

This is the cleaned up, self-contained, inkjet system.

Courtesy of fellow Artmatr artist/engineer Sang Won Leigh

Finally we arrive at X4, my final printer for Artmatr.