Daniel Savage’s kaleidoscopic animations are made with marker pen “robot drawings”

Starting out his studies in percussion performance before switching to a graphic design program in college, Daniel Savage hasn’t always been in the world of visual arts... but the musician turned designer/illustrator took “pretty naturally” to animation when he first started to explore motion in his work, “as it’s all about rhythm”, he says. More recently acclaimed for his impressive drawing machine creations, Daniel has set up a scientific system in which his pen plotter robot creates multi-layered marker drawings that form the frames for his brightly-coloured abstract animations.

When asked about how he got started working with such a unique drawing contraption, the animator tells It’s Nice That: “I’ve always wanted to find a way to combine clean geometric shapes with hand-drawn animation – the pen plotter is the most efficient way to execute this.” Preparing his drawings for plotting is “pretty similar to how you might set up a screen print”, he tells us. By separating his colours into individual layers, he hands over his work to his handy drawing assistant to translate into distinct grid layouts of perfectly filled patches and lines, adding a satisfying structure to his moving colour patches. Once drawn out Daniel, scans these colourful squares in at a high resolution so he can crop in really close to the frames, achieving a distinct grainy texture to his animated works, something that he thinks “adds a richness you can’t really get digitally”.

Working with the plotter forces Daniel to “strip back the work to the bare minimum”, he tells us. His seemingly perfectly selected, dreamy colour layers are only “limited by whatever markers I use, which is great because I can’t overthink it”, he says. It’s in the layering of one or two markers that the animator exposes the many hues and variations of his colour combinations across his animated frames. Colour isn’t the process’ only variable though, as Daniel says there is a lot of experimentation to be done in translating his original drawings (sometimes sketchbook doodles, sometimes digital experiments) into the vector data that determines the pen plotter’s “visual rhythm”.

From a distance, the animator’s spots of colour seem to mix more and more, his choice of small thick markers with bleeding lines only adding to the abstraction of his drawings. With his works digitally translating sunsets, rivers and moving landscapes, Daniel tells us: “there’s something interesting about letting nature inspire a robot drawing”.