Chaos in the medium: watercolour plotting — Amy Goodchild

Brush 1 is the one I cut short, resulting in a scratchy line.

Brush 2 and 3 are similar, but 3 performs ‘better’ - note the defined gap in the centre of the ‘a’ and the correct alignment on the start/end of the circles.

A long brush can lead to “inaccurate” shapes, due to the way the bristles are dragged over the paper and become pushed around - you can see what I mean in the 4c photograph below, where the bristles are dragged from the left to the right.

This effect can be reduced by carefully setting the height of the brush so that the tip only just touches the paper and by using brushes with firmer bristles. Brush 3’s bristles are much more collected than brush 2’s.

Many of these brushes are flat and I placed them diagonally in the plotter. Particularly with brush 3, you can see how this results in thinner lines in the / orientation and thicker ones in the \ orientation, creating a calligraphic effect.