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comment by kleinbl00
Looks awesome. Not willing to believe, however, that it works.

Yep. Checked the gallery site:

http://westcollects.com/westCollection/view_artist/artwork/2...

That there is nothing but a painted typewriter. It did not make that image, or any image.





scarp  ·  4734 days ago  ·  link  ·  
What on that page suggests that it doesn't work?
kleinbl00  ·  4733 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Ever used a typewriter? Even an old Selectric ball?

Key goes down, letterstrike hits ribbon, ribbon hits paper, ribbon retracts from paper, letterstrike retracts, paper advances.

This thing, she painted all the keystrikes. Not only that, but her two-tone keys are attached to one-tone keystrikes, which have no way to refresh their coloring, and if you're using oil, you're going to get a hell of a smear from adjacent keys every time you use it - unless they're dry, of course.

You could theoretically make something like this with oil pastels, but it wouldn't look like a typewriter. It certainly wouldn't give you the picture in the carriage. You'd get pixels.

thenewgreen  ·  3271 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Have you seen these?

kleinbl00  ·  3271 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've seen variations of them. They're part of the Underwood Fetishism movement.

I suspect that because I learned to type on a manual typewriter, I am forever immune from fetishizing a manual typewriter. They're a bitch to use. I am immune from the "typewriter of pain" argument.

scarp  ·  4733 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Well damn. Can't say I'm not disappointed, but you're probably right. It did think it seemed unlikely at first, but my rationalization was that the paints would bleed together to create the effect. Actually, couldn't that still be true is the same paper was reused multiple times?
kleinbl00  ·  4733 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Again - as a work of art, I think it's moderately cool. I prefer functional art... but then, Dali's "Lobster Telephone" is in the Tate, and if it actually worked it would have been kitsch.

Thing is, that typewriter would be a bitch to use. You'd have to dab each letter on the part you wanted, and let it go "splat." Then you'd have to dab the next letter and let it go "splat." Since we're talking oils, you'd get a 2-line tall splat (uppercase and lowercase). Not only that, but unless you physically "dabbed" the key on the paper, you'd get a splat with an uppercase and lowercase letter in white in the middle of each of them.

Which might be really cool looking. It wouldn't look like the paper in the carriage, though.

To get the effect this setup would give you if it were real, the easiest thing would probably be to savage an inkjet and hack it. Map the keys of a keyboard to colors and set up a script so that when you hit a key, it gives you saturation of that color for that patch, and advances one keystroke to the next. That would be a task for a hacker/engineer, though, not an artist.

Could you build this in a truetype font, I wonder? Something in Photoshop? I ain't no programmer, but I can "design" how it would work.