Made for the time of year.
01 / DRAWERS
Pick through the pile. Open a drawer for the other things it can make.
Arrange Shelves A–Z Thematic
Opening the drawers…
Nothing matched. Try a different word, or clear the filters.
Clear filters Open a studio directly:
Plot decoder : Point a phone camera at a plot (or upload a photo) and read the hidden message back.Purloined plot studio : Unravel the Purloined's knitting encoders as plots: dot charts, stitches, cross-stitch, punch cards, Truchet.Cipher garden : Drawings that are the code: Truchet tiles, mazes, a Hilbert thread, ridgelines, pigpen, constellations, cipher disks, automata, knots.Overlay studio : Two sheets, a slide or a cut: visual cryptography, moire reveals and turning grilles.Signal book : Alphabets as pictures: ship's signal flags on hoists, semaphore, ogham, braille shapes and tap code.Spider web studio : Webs grown the way a spider builds them: orbs, cobwebs, sheet webs, dew and moonlit hedges.Weather studio : Clouds, rain, lightning, fog and rainbows over the hills, or a synoptic chart with isobars and fronts.Worlds studio : A planetary system from a seed: its atlas, its worlds close up and from the ground, and the life of each from molten to the end of its sun.Orrery studio : A new star system every seed: plan, tilted, textbook plate and brass orrery views.Island atlas studio : Islands nobody has visited, as survey sheets, antique charts, portolans and treasure maps.Underground studio : A cut-away slice of the earth: roots, mycelium, burrows, strata and a buried fossil.Archaeology studio : Trench sections, site plans with findspots, a finds sieve and a pottery refit, drawn to excavation conventions.Flint studio : Stones knapped into handaxes, blade cores, Levallois flakes, arrowheads and scrapers, drawn as lithic illustration plates.Jointed figure studio : Cut-out dolls and jumping jacks: the pen draws each part, the blade cuts them out with pin holes, split pins put them together. Cut sizes untested.Paper Dolls / Paper Clothes : Everyday dolls: clothes, hair and hats for the jointed paper doll, pinned at the joints or folded on with tabs, or a gangly doll with concertina limbs. Cut sizes untested.Jointed animal studio : Cut-out rabbits, horses, dogs, cats, elephants and pigs with legs, heads and tails on split pins; spots, stripes or patches. Cut sizes untested.Vampire paper doll : A jointed cut-out vampire with fangs, a tailcoat and a tall-collared cape that rides on the shoulder pins. Cut sizes untested.Spooky garland : Ghosts, pumpkins and bats to string across a window, with jack-o-lantern faces drawn in pen or cut right through to glow. Cut sizes untested.Poison apple : An Inktober apple in tattoo flash style, from candy apple to rotten to the core: drips, a skull in the shine, a worm, fumes and a ribbon banner. Pen widths untested.Machine relic : An Inktober relic: old hardware in a caged jar of fluid, hoses and cables, wax seals and a cog or halo ringed with binary scripture. Pen widths untested.Miniature kit : An Inktober miniature: the Meatsack figure as a model kit on its sprue, and a loupe over its chip showing an isometric city of the self. Pen widths untested.Cactus : An Inktober cactus: a specimen plate, a saguaro that ages to bones, a windowsill, a desert night and a prickly pear with its cochineal. Pen widths untested.Smack : An Inktober net that folds up: a smacked cube die with rays and cracks that meet over its edges, or a lantern wrapped in a smack of jellyfish with cut-out bells. Cut and fold sizes untested.Ogre jack : An Inktober jumping jack: pull the string and the ogre's bent arms come up into claws while a RARRR! bubble swings out from behind it. Pull geometry and cut sizes untested.Pan lino : Inktober day 7, panic: Pan the goat god carved like a lino block and cut from one colour of vinyl, standing, behind a tree, or holding on to the trees in a block of night woods. Vinyl sizes untested.Stink plume : Inktober day 8, stinky: a corpse flower, cheese, an old sock, a fish or a bin, its smell rising as a plume of streamlines, cartoon stink lines or a contour map, with flies looping through it; age them one at a time or in a row, bud to collapse. Pen widths untested.Ram skull : Inktober day 9, ram: a ram skull on its mount with horns grown a ring a year along a log spiral; a wall of mounts from lamb to old ram, the years overlaid in colour, or RAM on the ram. Pen widths untested.Battering ram : Inktober day 9, ram: a siege ram to fold up, a gable-roofed shed and the beam through it, wheels and horns on split pins, in wood, ram heraldry or RAM circuits. Cut and fold sizes untested.Mystical : Inktober day 10, mystical: a pair of paper hands holding, cradling or hovering over a crystal ball, a tea cup, tarot cards or an open palm, as three sheets to cut out and layer. Pen widths untested.Bottle : Inktober day 11, rescue: seven bottle shapes with liquid, glass and stoppers, five label shapes with your own title, as one bottle, a shelf or a potions countertop.Toss : Inktober day 12, toss: a coin, die or graduation cap caught at several moments along a throw, spinning, with a dashed trail and shadows, the last one landed.Flimsy bridge : Inktober day 13, flimsy: six bridges (Pratt, Howe, Warren, K, bowstring, plank) as fold-up card nets with a solver drawn in ink, and a plate of the Tacoma Narrows twisting apart. Cut sizes untested.Victorian lady : Inktober day 14, lady: a corseted fashion-plate paper doll on an interlocking cross base, with gowns from 1860, 1885 and 1895 (day dress, evening gown, walking suit), petticoat, capelet, hats, parasol, fan, muff and bouquet, three hairstyles etched in fine strands. Cut sizes untested.Hooray cards : Inktober day 15, hooray: HOORAY cut through a card covered in one pen pattern, a second pattern on the coloured paper behind, hearts, stars and smileys drawn on and cut from both panels as confetti, a pocket for every offcut, and the message on its own card in corner slits. Cut sizes untested.Confused deck : Inktober day 19, confused: trading cards drawn as engineering drawings, each with its own title block: lift detail C (there is none), lift sheet 1 (sheet 2 is blank), ask the engineer, and spin a tolerance wheel of real and unhinged callouts. Cut and brad sizes untested.Lounge : Inktober day 20, lounge: a living room drawn as a CAD floor plan at a true scale, furniture as library blocks, and the cats on a layer of their own, lounging on the sofa, the rug, the window seat and the sunbeam, with a revision cloud, an RFI and a dimension on the star. Also a block library sheet.Bletchley : Inktober, hero: the people behind the code. A Bombe wall of 36 Enigmas stopped at the answer, with up to a dozen Wrens' hands at the drums (cuffs, rings, painted nails) and the menu ghosted behind; a Wren, name redacted, drawn only in Enigma letters; and the people of Station X, a different person and job at Bletchley for every number, singly or as a cast sheet. Their letters decode to the Official Secrets Act 1911, then a dedication, with the key printed underneath. A working Enigma is built in.Beacon : Inktober day 22, beacon: a message to the stars as a bitmap whose width and height are both prime, sent from Arecibo's bowl, a steerable dish or an array as rings that carry its bits, with a Dyson swarm that listens or opens a window and answers with a bitmap of its own; or a LORAN chart, radio beacons on a generated coast with their time differences drawn as exact hyperbolic lanes, the waves that make them, and a ship fixing itself where two lanes cross.Pottery puzzle : A decorated pot drawn in pen and broken into sherds on the cut layer, with a board sheet to rebuild it on. Cut sizes untested.Lino decals : Ravens, crows, skulls and Pan carved like a lino block and cut from one colour of vinyl, as die-cut figures, moons, rings or carved blocks. Vinyl sizes untested.Gear 3D studio : 3D gears under a perspective lens on floors of rays, rings, ripples and Truchet ribbons.Gear BAM studio : Comic 3D gears with crosshatched walls, riso halftone tops and extruded sound effects.Gear weave studio : Hundreds of overlapping gears woven over and under like chainmail.Gear reverb studio : A meshing gear train wrapped in reverb rings, tilted under a camera.Forks studio : A copied mind drawn three ways: a family tree of forks and merges, an upload slice by slice, and a head made of its own code.Meatsack studio : The body as hardware: augmentations drawn as old patent sheets, a body replaced part by part, and a line of clones in their vats.Spirograph studio : A wheel rolls round the outline of letters or a shape and a pen in its hole draws the loops: rings, laps and up to four pens.Math garden studio : Three ways to grow a drawing out of a rule: a harmonograph's damped pendulums, L-system plants and fractal curves, and Mandelbrot or Julia sets as contour lines.02 / STUDIOS
Straight to the machinery. Generators, controls, SVG exports.
03 / FIELD NOTES
Before you feed the plotter. Paper, pens, and things worth checking.
01 Find a starting point + Open a drawer above and compare its specimens. Choose Make this drawing to load that specimen’s saved controls. Change one thing at a time to see what it does.
02 Understand the marks + Hatching makes tone from parallel strokes. Seeds make chance repeatable. In hidden-message studios, the drawing carries information: keep the reading key and machine marks when you want to decode it later.
03 Put it on paper + Export a millimetre SVG from the studio. In Design Space, set the artwork to Pen, check its physical size, Attach, then Make. For separate pen files, keep the paper on the mat and align the same corner ticks between passes.
04 Read it back + For supported hidden-message plots, use the camera decoder with the required marks and settings. A clean gallery copy and a machine-readable plot can need different exports.
Open the plot decoder ↗ 01 Start with a silhouette + Open a lino drawer and choose Make this cut to load its saved controls. Change the subject, frame, gouges or size in the studio.
02 Keep and weed + Filled shapes are the vinyl you keep. Holes and the surrounding material are weeded away. The studio checks closed loops, narrow strips, small pieces and gaps before export.
03 Send it to the blade + Export the decal cut layer from the studio. In Design Space, set it to Basic Cut, check the millimetre size and keep any weeding box aligned. Choose the material settings for your vinyl and make a small test cut first; physical cut sizes are untested.
04 Transfer the result + For adhesive vinyl, weed the waste and use transfer tape to place the decal. For iron-on, the studio already mirrors the export: do not mirror it again in Design Space.