Drawing Machines: Lovers of Today

Drawing Machine

Attempt 1

This was the beginning of my journey. I started off by creating the base with the dining hall’s plastic cups with sticks. I taped the cups to stabilize the base and put a mini ketchup cup in the middle for the paint to create pendulum art. As you can see in the photo, I could not get the right consistency for the paint which left a few drops of paint on the cardboard. I was trying to create a prototype of my art, which did not work out well. 

Attempt 2

This was when I tried to put water to make the side of the cups even more stable than before. Then I used a bigger cup for the paint to draw art, which also did not work well. I learned that the cup in the middle was too heavy for the sticks to hold while gravity was making it heavier drawing the art. In the picture, you can see that my art fell apart completely and made a mess. The consistency of the paint in this photo was not the best either, hence the paint was too thin, and could not draw as I wanted. 

Attempt 3

This was when I used the bottom part of the table to create the base, hung the strings on the pole, and taped the plastic bottle. This was a huge step in my artwork because the base was big enough to hold gravity while the bottle was spinning. However, I had to open a hole in the cap and the bottom of the bottle to create the air to flow. Which made it harder to reuse the bottle I was using and it took time to prepare for it to work every time. On a positive note, the paint did come out more nicely than before because I created the airflow and used two strings to hold the bottle. I was still not convinced with the way the bottle was creating art because I wanted to make the circle symmetrical. The cause of this problem was that it kept hitting the wall and I could not have the sting from the middle since I was using the bottom of the table, I was not satisfied. 

Attempt 4

This was when I used two colors on the paper, which turned out nicely. At first, I used blue paint to create a circle then I switched the bottle that I prepared which had pink paint in it. I wanted to explore my art using multiple colors. Personally, I felt amazing when the pink paint started to draw on top of the blue paint because this was closest to my ideal vision of my art at this point. I still had to adjust the bottle while it was spinning because I still could not understand that it was better for me to let go of the bottle rather than push the bottle in the beginning. 

Attempt 5

This was when I used two bottles on both sides of the pole and used two different colors which were purple and turquoise. I like the colors that I used here but it was my first attempt to use two bottles at once, I was not sure how it would turn out but was excited to see how it worked. This opened my eyes in a way to see those two bottles collide and hug each other. Then goes back to creating their own art. I liked the idea of this and wanted to make it better as an art piece. I was starting to feel more confident here that I could create something really cool. You can see in the photo that the consistency of the turquoise paint was too thick and it did not work out well. Therefore, I tried to perfect the paint consistency and tried again. Also, at this point I knew where the bottles would collide so I changed the way I put the paper as well. 

Attempt 6

This turned out amazing. Especially the pink paint turned out exactly how I envisioned it when I started. The blue did not turn out like the pink did but I was still happy to see how well this worked. From this part, I wanted to create more with different colors and experiment with the paint’s consistency. Although, I was on a good flow with creating new stuff the only thing that I was bothered by was that it took time every time to prepare for the machine to work because I was using plastic bottles. I needed this to be more continuous and easy to set up. 

Attempt 7

This was when I came up with the title “Lovers of Today”. I was inspired by how the bottles collide only once and separate to create their own drawings. It made me think of two people that come together for a little and go on about their day after. I liked the way it was not the cleanest lines because it shows how each path was created as if it was not planned. If it were two perfect lines, I would think of the universe or stars rather than people. At this point, I was still thinking about how I could make my art more continuous. As I was dying my hair with two gloves in my hands, I realized that I could use the gloves on my art. I came up with the idea to attach those gloves to a cup and create another drawing machine. This was also relating to how I imagined those bottles to be humanlike, which made sense to me to use something that was more humanlike. 

Attempt 8

This was when I changed the plastic bottles to two gloves that were attached to cups. This made it a lot easier to prepare and less messy. I also had black paper to use on my art. I liked how I could put more paint as I go and create more abstract art rather than how I started off. 

Different angle

In this picture, I used different colors and spun the cups multiple times to see how the art will look. I liked that the paint consistency was different each time. Because I made holes in multiple fingers of the gloves, the paint came out in multiple lines in one go which made the artwork faster. 

Conference Work

Lastly, this was how I presented my art which I think worked pretty well compared to how I started. Although I could not make the art continue to present in front of people, I was still satisfied with my project. I was grateful to have an open space for myself to explore what I wanted to create in this class and was able to provide equipment using the things I could get around me. I put up all the artwork that I have created on the wall and left the gloves on the cups hung on the strings.

Author: Rina Saito