7 days, 47438 pen strokes :\. Lara’s work and a recurring dragon on this blog :). I sped up the machine to make it 7 days instead of 10, so it’s slightly more inaccurate, but more importantly I failed to anticipate that ink would run out faster. I used to have about 1.5 days between pen swaps, here it’s barely above 1 day. No harm done I got there in time, but I should have thought about it when I adjusted speed.
I lined it up with a big public event and tons of people got to see it.
No sure if there’s anything more to say about lasers & post-it portraits, it was the now usual formula. I’ve enhanced the pipeline some to do auto-face-cropping as it is a step we usually waste lots of time on. Esther & I rehearsed over the week end. She runs the operation during the event.
Some recurring questions I get asked at these events:
“What are the machines for normally?” Nothing, their sole purpose is to drag pens and shine cat lasers.
“Is this your job?” Nope, just a side quest.
“So how does this work?” I try to see what part they’re interested in before I launch into a 3 hour tirade :).
“Did you build this?” yes.
It’s very gratifying to see people stare at your work for a while. You can see the gears turning in their heads. I’ll sit by the big machine sometimes to watch people’s reaction to it. When I swap its pen people will come up and tell me how much they like it. I’m just glad for having the opportunity to do something cool in the world.









