Lan Truong’s pen plotter paintings are making us way less wary of art made by machines

Recently, the illustrator Lan Truong has found herself particularly fascinated by pen plotters. She first encountered them last year when scrolling through Instagram, coming across fellow makers who were using drawing machines to create art. After doing a bit of research Lan purchased two and started messing around, conducting all kinds of wonderful experiments with paint, markers and inks recently.

Treating the plotter as a kind of print-making tool, Lan put her digital illustrations through an image processing program that let her modify them for the machine, sending off her files with new surprises emerging from the process each time. “A lot of people use pen plotters to create generative art — art that’s created with code, algorithms, rules and parameters,” illustrator Lan tells It’s Nice That. “I don’t know anything about coding, so my intention is to use them to turn my digital illustrations into physical ones.”

Some of the pieces Lan has created don’t look like they were made with a machine at all. Those made with ink highlighters and blotchy paint still feel like they cover the page with the same human errors and variation as a person makes by hand. These reproductions of everyday things, initially drawn on screen, look far from robotic when you see the on paper results. The process too is a wonder to watch – the illustrators even worked out how to hook it up to her watercolour palette to the machine which makes for a very satisfying back and forth painting sequence.

Lan has experienced a lot of awe during this new chapter, and so have many others. “There are some people, however, who bristle at the idea of using a machine to create art, and I understand their wariness,” the illustrator says. “They might ask: Why are you using a machine to create art? Why can’t you just paint those bananas or that flower yourself?” The artist’s honest answer is that she is simply far more interested in how she can use a plotter to paint at the moment, rather than painting or drawing herself.

A lot of this interest stems from all the modifications the artist can make in the inbetween: “I can modify my illustrations in dozens of different ways before they reach my pen plotters,” she says, even down to the mark making. Lan has been trialing different recreations of her digital drawings by instructing the plotter to use “short dashes or long dashes, small or big dots or squiggles”, she shares. Then there is choosing a medium – different pens, paintbrushes or highlighters, all of which create completely different impressions.

“I think it’s kind of neat that plotters can produce work that feels both handmade and mechanical or robotic,” Lan ends, “I would describe the work that I’m producing with my plotters as ‘handmade with a machine’ – even though I’m using a machine to create art, I think the outcome carries some handmade spirit. They all start out as something that I put time and thought into.”

This new obsession has come along with a lot of other making, with the illustrator trying her hand at an embroidery machine, some debossing and even laser cutting her colourful graphic drawings into satisfying puzzle pieces with wood. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed following along for all of joys of these material explorations.