2014-02-26 Makelangelo Spray Paint and Line Stroke

I want to add spray painting to the Makelangelo. Instead of lifting the pen off the paper it will push on the nozzle of the spray can to make a dot. Sounds simple, right? the devil is in the details.

Ever use an art program like Adobe Illustrator? Illustrator lets you draw a line, then change the style of the line to dotted, dashed, thicker or thinner. That style is the line stroke.

So far the Makelangelo has always been using a pen. put the pen down, drag to make a line, lift the pen. That’s one style of stroke. The spray paint can’t do that without making a mess. Hold the nozzle down, drag a line, let go of the nozzle and there will be waaay too much paint on the wall. To prevent drips the spray paint has to move along the line and tap the nozzle. This is a different kind of stroke.

To solve this I created in the program a set of tool classes like DrawingTool_Pen and DrawingTool_Spraypaint. The image converter doesn’t get to know what kind of stroke is going to be used. It doesn’t even know which kind of tool the user selected! It says “tool start here, go to here, then stop”. The tool handles all the stroke features.

Here’s a video of my last attempt to get the spray tool working. Seems good to me!