So what's the difference between plotted and printed artwork?

Summary

The drawbacks I'd be remiss not to mention some of the drawbacks of pen plotters. There are many good reasons that nearly every commercial printing studio, design house, and architecture firm has abandoned the pen plotter as their tool of choice. It's relatively slow, comparatively. In a race vs. a human hand, the plotter has an edge in both speed and precision. Against even a basic Inkjet printer, though, a pen plotter is many orders of magnitude slower. I routinely create artworks that take 12+ hours to draw via the machine. The slow process severely limits the sizes of my editions - I simply can't do unlimited runs of artworks. Multi-color processes aren't trivial. Plotting something with multiple colors is tricky. If using pens, you must change inks. If using paint, you must clean and resaturate brushes. For example, I love the bold pop of Posca markers, but since they must be occasionally primed by shaking the body, there isn't a great workflow for plotter art. Oftentimes, addressing these limitations is a manual process. Other issues arise, too. Removing items from the plotter arm is likely to cause misalignments, which will be apparent in the artwork. I ended up designing a 3D printed holder to address my alignment issues, but I still have to manually switch pens for each pass of a color in a drawing. Recently, I had the chance to compare a plotted version of my artwork to a professional-quality print from a reputable shop, and I was frankly blown away at the quality of the print. The printed resolution was exceptional, and details were sharp down to the sub-millimeter. The color was excellent, better than I could have imagined.