Common Kanji Plot
常用漢字
jouyou / common use kanji
Final Artwork (August, 2023)
Kanji are a collection of symbols used in Japanese writing to convey a wide variety of concepts and readings (how you say them). They were adopted from China around the 5th century. Prior to that time, Japan did not have a writing system. Now, they have at least three. I guess they wanted to make up for lost time.
Common or regular-use Kanji represent the roughly 2,200 characters that the Japanese government has identified as essential for Japanese literacy.
I've studied them every day since the beginning of 2022. Given the time I've invested in learning them, it seemed only fitting to get a robot to write all of them onto a piece of brown paper for me.
Production Gallery
This project offered up a fistful of little challenges to overcome. I used an AxiDraw to plot the characters, so the first step was simply getting a handle on that tool. That aspect is pretty straightforward, but there are non-trivial considerations, such as adjusting pen travel speed to optimize for ink absorption.
It was also necessary to assess a number of different pens for the job, as this design represents hundreds of meters of writing, and surprisingly few pens can write reliably for that distance without intervention. For the record, the solution was the Lamy Safari fine nib fountain pen. I'll be using these pens for many future plotter projects.
