They state that there’s a lot more to a Jackson Pollock painting than randomly scattering paint on a canvas, as well as the auction value of his work seems to confirm that claim. If you want to produce some a lot more traditional artwork, however, but are missing the artistic muse that influenced Pollock, perhaps you can put your innovative energies to work building a robot that will produce the art for you.
[Dane Kouttron] was able to get his hands on an old SCARA robotic arm, as well as was just recently influenced to create a paintbrush-weilding robot with it for the 2nd annual Robot Art competition. getting one of these ancient (circa 1983) robots working once again is no simple task though. [Dane] utilized LinuxCNC to assist reverse engineer the robot’s controls as well as had to develop a great deal of supporting hardware to get the very heavy robot to work properly. The entire process took around two months, as well as whatever from color choice to paint refill to the actual painting itself is totally automated.
Be sure to inspect out the video after the break to see the robot in action. The writeup goes into excellent detail about the robot, as well as includes whatever from reverse engineering the encoders to auto-cleaning a paintbrush. If you don’t have a SCARA robot arm in your parts drawer, though, there are great deals of other choices to check out for robot-created artwork.