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I had a thought last night that started while looking at the 3d print preview in matter control. I really like the rings that tell you the size of the printed object. It would be cool if they appeared on the onyx, glass, or another custom bed surface. I was thinking of ways to get this painted onto the boro glass or an aluminum heat spreader when the a thought occurred to me. Why not make a 1 layer 3d model of it?

I think you could print using a writing utensil that is both permanent and thermally stable (any suggestions?). You'd also need a "hot end mount" like the pen holder from tricklaser. You'd then make a profile for this special mount that used 0% extrusion and no temperature change for the heated bed. Your "print" would be done pretty darn quickly. If someone got really into this and had a proper slicing profile, you could even put in pauses to change "extruder" to include dozens of colors to turn it into what looked like a real painting.

Has anyone tried or heard of someone doing something similar to this? It could even be expanded to paper clamped to the heated bed. Seems like it could make some pretty unique looking drawings. In one of my more devious thoughts, I also imagined a scammer using this to trick the authentication experts into thinking a "printed" autograph was the real thing due to it using real ink and natural looking pen strokes.

I did something sorta like that with a Haas VMC and a set of sharpies in collets. The biggest issue would be getting the generated code to match realistic writing styles. That, and getting the difference in pressure and height to come through on different portions of a stroke. IMO, if you want to get something that can actually write, and actually paint, you need something that mimics a human arm, as the way the wrist and elbows interact, not to mention fingers, thumbs, and general palm flex, can make a big difference in how something looks. However, printing with a sharpie would be easy. They'll even survive being rammed into the bed hard enough to shorten them an inch and still write. The cap doesn't fit afterwards though (Experience also says they don't leak at 1300 RPM. That was an interesting semester)

Attach it with a spring so you can use z height to modulate pressure.

One of my students had found a nice pyhton program to translate mouse drawing to coordinates. You couls scale those to generate gcode