We recently got some inexpensive multicolored 0.3mm technical markers (AmzAffil) for use on the AxiDraw and they are pretty good! For this week’s batch of days for our 31-box AxiDraw calendar, I wanted to play with doing “flood fill” / solid color fills. Normally the “hatch fill” extension part of the AxiDraw Inkscape extensions creates slanted lines to imply a filled color. I knew a true full fill would be touchy because the paper can tear when fully inked, but I wanted to try. It turns out to work great!
There’s not much of a trick to it, just adjust the “hatch fill” algorithm to have closely-spaced lines (“2” for a 0.3mm pen worked well) and “connect nearby ends” to go back-n-forth to minimize pen up/down messiness. Also orienting your hatch direction, optimizing for your object (0º in my case) can make the fill succeed better. Plotting does take a while (especially for multi-colors like the 12 ornaments) and does cause some bleed-through. But I think it looks awesome.
And the video of it is mesmerizing: