Drawing Tip: A thicker pen hides mediocrity

Your drawings probably look rubbish because you’re using an old biro that happened to be laying around. Nobody’s used one of these since cassette tapes stopped needing to be fixed, so throw that in the drawer full of batteries, twine and assorted electrical tape from whence it came.

Instead, go thicker. Go felt tip. Go a marker if that’s all you got. Because if your drawing skills aren’t very good, going thicker is always a good way to hide this fact.

From How To Draw a Croissant When You Can’t Really Draw a Croissant.

Scribit, a robot that can draw on walls

Scribit is a vertical plotter that can draw any content sourced from the web – and update it in real time.

It is mounted on a wall using only 2 plugs and a wire in between. You send it an image from within the app and it will start drawing (with support for 4 colors at a time).

Shipping is expected June 2019, but like with all Kickstarter-funded projects that may vary 😉

Scribit →

Rough.js – Create SVGs with a hand-drawn, sketchy, appearance

Rough.js is a light weight (~8k), Canvas based library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style. The library defines primitives to draw lines, curves, arcs, polygons, circles, and ellipses. It also supports drawing SVG paths.

To get started first create a rough canvas:

const rc = rough.canvas(document.getElementById('canvas'));

On that rough canvas you can then start drawing things, and tweak the “roughness” along with that:

rc.rectangle(15, 15, 80, 80, { roughness: 0.5, fill: 'red' });
rc.rectangle(120, 15, 80, 80, { roughness: 2.8, fill: 'blue' });
rc.rectangle(220, 15, 80, 80, { bowing: 6, stroke: 'green', strokeWidth: 3 });

The code above evaluates to this:

Rough.js – Create SVGs with a hand-drawn, sketchy, appearance →

AutoDraw: Fast Drawing for Everyone

After Quickdraw a few months ago – in which A.I. guesses what you are doodling – now comes AutoDraw from Google.

AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool. It pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast.

AutoDraw’s suggestion tool uses the same technology used in QuickDraw, to guess what you’re trying to draw. Right now, it can guess hundreds of drawings and we look forward to adding more over time.

AutoDraw →