Making holograms with a pen plotter
A hobbyist explains how to create hand-etched holograms using a pen plotter and simple materials like oil. The process relies on manipulating light reflections off ridges to create moving virtual images.
Why it matters
It demonstrates creative applications of low-cost hardware and optical physics for DIY art projects.
I have a pen-plotter! It’s great. It’s like having a printer but slow and it breaks more often. I got it on eBay and it came sorta broken and I immediately spent the difference between what I paid and the price of new one fixing it. Now it’s fixed!
My favorite thing to do with the pen plotter is to create things that I wouldn’t be able to create on, say, a printer, or by hand. 1 Sometimes that’s because the medium is different; for example, these gold ink postcards I made of an Iguanodon fossil :
But recently, I’ve gotten excited about using the pen plotter to make holograms.
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