Paint printers - do they exist ?

Some while back I read about someone who had developed a printer that worked with paint rather than ink but I can't remember where the story came from.

It would seem to me that what with the developments in the 2D and 3D printer worlds, someone would by now have been able to develop a commercial printer that uses paint that was able to give our work a little more depth.

I love my Epson 3880 for normal printing but some of my work could do with added depth so if anyone knows of a solution it would be good to hear about it.

You need to be a member of Studio Artist to add comments!

Join Studio Artist

Email me when people reply –

Replies

  • A few years back an artist built a "printer" that painted with real paint. Essentially this was an xy coordinate rig that had a looping wire. The wire was pulled through the selected paint color and special nozzles blew the paint off the wire and on to the canvas. It was a pretty niffty system and he did offer to build one for anybody willing to pony up 25k or so. I can no longer find the link to his work, nor remember his name. The problem from a dimensional perspective is that the paint was in effect spayed on.. no brush strokes. Of course it was still wet after "printing" so one could go in after the fact and use a real brush to add stroke detail. The far easier solution might be to have your work printed on canvas then paint over it.

    There have been various projects that have had small robots with either paint brushes or spray cans which were programmed to create images as they wheeled around. I have even seen a paintball gun used in a similar fashion. But none of these are truly what you are after. Nor would the large computerized rigs used for painting ads on the sides of buildings be user friendly for a personal project.

    I have posted else where about printing with UV curable inks, which being pigment encapsulated in a photo-sensitive polymer are truly more akin to paints than inks. The output from these machines can be stunning. If you were to own one or have a very close friend who was willing to let you experiment with one you could in theory take this process to new areas of expression. Because the "ink" remains wet until cured by the UV light (usually attached to the print head) one could in theory turn off the UV lamp, print several dozen layers on the same sheet then drag a brush through the image before curing it in a separate process. 

    Good luck finding someone willing to let you "play". These machines are 250K new, and still around 35k heavily used, so they generally are busy with the commercial work necessary to get a return on such an investment.

    If you have the inclination and ability a Cartesian pick and place robot could be programmed to follow the bezier paths created by SA in a path recorded session. A bit of tweaking could get it to drag a paint brush while doing so. You would still not get the same results as a SA work --because of the way SA brushes are constructed- but you might get some very interesting results.

    here is one link of interest I will post more later:

    http://bengrosser.com/projects/interactive-robotic-painting-machine/

    http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture...

    http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/

  • Really fascinating. Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

  • Studio Artist originated from a project i was interested in, building a painting machine that painted with real paint on canvas. So the software started with that goal in mind, controlling the live painting robot. I got sidetracked from the original goal once i started playing with the early version of the painting software in it's own right.

    ...

    I believe the Utah based company liveart was referring to with regard to wirejet printing was called Pixation, and the technology was developed by Dean Anderson. He ended up selling the technology to 3M. i don't think they ever did anything with it. His large format printers allows you to use house paint in cans to paint a large canvas (or board) mounted vertically for printing. You had to pay Dean to fly out to your site to put the thing together. I had thought about getting one at one point.  All of the old info about it (not that it was ever documented very well) on the web is gone at this point. If you looked in the web archive you could probably find the old pages.

    ...

    There are a lot of computer controlled woodworking machines available these days that could be modified to paint with brushes or pens. These machines have a large x-y movement stage with a small amount of z depth movement. I had looked into this as well at one point a long time ago, these machines are way more developed and cheaper these days.

    ...

    There are also various kits for x-y movement stages, as well as some open source projects at this point that do this kind of thing. For people who like to build their own devices. I've seen one home brew project that used curtain rails from home depot as the x-y movement stage with a small servo controller to drive the painting movement. There are a lot of really small x-y stage kits of finished modules you can buy. It gets a little more tricky when you want to do really large canvas sizes.

    ...

    In the old days of compute technology, flat bed pen plotters were readily available. They were fairly easy to convert to painting machines. They are hard to come by these days other than on ebay as old used technology.

    ...

    Another approach is to use a conventional digital printer to print photo masks that you would convert into cutout masks to build hand painted seriographs by painting through the set of cutout mask overlays that define a large painting. You could also use something like a roland sign cutter to computer cut your masks. You then paint through the masks. there are plenty of paintings in galleries here in hawaii that are actually seriographs.

    ...

    A fairly common thing artists do is to generate a large format epson print, and then hand paint a clear thick coating on top of it to build depth in the finished print.

    MakerBot sells 3D printers nowdays. both kits and finished machines. you feed reels of colored plastic wire into them and they use it as the raw material for building up a printed 3D object. I always wondered about using these to build raised relief paintings. The colors for the plastic wire are pretty garish, i don't know how well they would pointillist mix color. 

    • Interesting to hear that you started out with this in mind. If you wanted to do it again and put the project on Kickstarter you'd do really well as I can see a big demand for this sort of machine.

      Thanks for taking the time to post.

  • There also used to be a printing service bureau in los angeles that used a large format 3M printer to digitally print oil paint pigments onto a canvas. The canvas was then heat treated to generate a finished oil painting. I don't know if they are still in business any more or not, this was over 10 years ago when i was looking into it.

This reply was deleted.

On the closure of the User Forum : An open letter to John Dalton

Hi John I have no idea what you are going through. However the impact you have made not to continue with the user forum and your desire keep it as a permanent feature as promised in the past is a big shock. It also betrays the faith and love we have shown in you and Studio Artist.  Bluntly spoken, it sucks. That you have chosen to follow this direction in silence, allowing no compassion or understanding on our part is a betrayal of the deepest level. What is going on? This is not the John…

Read more…
4 Replies · Reply by Paul Perlow 35 minutes ago

Interdimensional Coincidence Control

Hi everyone, I am glad the site is still here! Here is a new short video I made. All made in Studio Artist, several separate videos with alpha channels, then combined in layers with the music in Blender. A lot of MSG running through brushes, with several of the brush Path Starts being controlled by the MSG Scan Generator in the Generator part of the Path Start in the Paint Synthesizer. Also some MSG running through a brush, then making a video of that with an alpha channel, then making that a…

Read more…
3 Replies · Reply by Thor Johnson Mar 22

Whats going on with this site?

Has anyone else gotten a warning about this site disappearing? An email form just popped up, asking me to contract the owner and leave a message to let them know that they may loose their "network"Did Synthetik forget to pay it's bills, or is something else going on?I think 8 months is more than enough vacation time. Is anyone at Synthetik doing any development work at all? 

Read more…
7 Replies · Reply by Alf 8 hours ago