Agreed 100%. It all comes down to the artists intentions, and plotters have many limitations. My hope for this article was to expose people to other options.
You're correct, there are some more sophisticated processes used by specialty printers such as CcMmYK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcMmYK_color_model). Something like this will use more inks and less halftones, giving better results in some cases.
Or are you referring to other printing methods, say for example silk screening? There, you would definitely select a specific ink to use. It just depends on what your goals are.
I am a fountain pen convert myself, and use them almost exclusively these days for my algorithmic plotter art. This website is a fantastic resource that I’ve referred to countless times.
I too have gone with fountain pens as my every day pen. There's zero waste with a bottle of ink and a cartridge. I find that the variety of inks to be superior too.
True! I specifically use Noodler's Bernanke Black ink because it's fast-drying. I'm left-handed, and I can easily smear ink as I write if it doesn't dry quickly. Left-to-right writing definitely favors right-handed people.
Oh, good grief, in that case you might want to start with a Pilot medium (roughly equivalent to a German no. 5 'fine') and work down from there. Without wishing to invite contumely on the sometimes extremely fractious topic that can be Noodler's inks, I will say my experience is that all the feed and nib throughput you can possibly give them will never really be too much, especially in Japanese pens.
As an artist the frustrating thing is I was never asked about whether two decades of my work could be used by for-profit companies to create tools that make my market harder.
That’s not cheating according to the definitions within this article that you’ve commented on.
Procreate is against gen AI on the grounded that it was unethically trained, and has become a vehicle of theft away from artists. They make a distinction between that and machine learning which is a very useful tools.
The AI-Assist tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc) want you to be "all-in" and that's why so many people end up fighting them. A delicate balance is hard to achieve when you're discarding 80% of the suggestions for 20% of the productivity boosts.
I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.
