There’s something a bit odd about the framed drawing that hangs on the wall of Revelstoke Coffee: It keeps changing itself.

“We were brainstorming and I thought, what if it is art that makes art?” said Richard Stoyle, who built the computer-controlled device that has been in the Main Street shop for three months. It uses a commercial pen plotter with Stoyle’s 3D-printed attachments and software tweaks to painstakingly draw everything from abstract patterns to realistic animals — a sloth was a recent favorite — over the course of a day or two.

Right now it’s doing something more unusual: carefully re-creating the Declaration of Independence, from truths held to be self-evident to John Hancock’s enormous signature. The document should be finished Saturday or Sunday after a pause while the coffee shop is closed July 3 and 4.

“We at Revelstoke are always looking for interesting, thought-provoking things for people to interact with at the shop,” said Alex Stoyle, Richard’s son, who owns the six-year-old shop with his wife, Lyndsey. “We thought this would draw a lot of interest… It is something that we could use to not only capture people’s attention but also start conversations. We like to do things that are timely, like drawing a tree on Arbor Day.”

With Independence Day looming, the family knew something patriotic would be appropriate.

“Right off the bat I said, we’re definitely doing the Declaration of Independence. That’ll be the coolest thing,” said Richard.

Unusual clock came first

Richard Stoyle is a recently retired pilot who flew for American Airlines for 33 years. With a degree in electrical engineering he has often dabbled in electronic projects. One of those became the shape-shifting clock that has hung in Revelstoke Coffee for three years, spelling out the time or the occasional word via 36 rotating faces.

He found the idea for the clock online, but the self-drawing artwork was built up from scratch, based on experience building the clock using his home computer-controlled router and 3-D printer.

“I had the experience using the CNC router and all that stuff. I thought, what if I built something with the same logic… motors that move something around in the X, Y and Z axis,” he said. “The build is pretty simple, actually. It looks amazing to a lot of people, but the technology is a pen-plotter, and I think the first of those came out in the 1960s.”

Richard found an open-source software online that would take pictures and convert them into vector graphics. “It’s really easy to go from [there] to the language that a CNC or 3-D printer understands.”

The tricky part, he said, is the pens.

Richard eventually built a device that holds five pens at a time and altered the pen plotter so it could swap out pens when told to.

The drawings use two types of pen: a Sakura micron with a very fine, felt tip, and a Uniball ball-point, which makes ink flow with a pressurized cartridge rather than depending on gravity, a design used for pens in the space station. The Uniball is needed because the pen is held horizontally against the paper as it draws.

Richard experimented with a fountain pen for the Declaration, but keeping it from clogging or running dry was too difficult. “We don’t want [staff] to have to babysit this. One of the goals was not to take people away from their primary job of making coffee and providing good service to mess with this thing on the wall.”

Holding the pens against the paper is tricky, too, since paper has minute variations in depth. It takes a spring to hold the pens at just the right pressure, and springs can become a problem over time.

The Declaration of Independence involves the same process, with just the felt-tip pens because no shading is involved. It turns out, however, that copying lots and lots of letters which were originally written with a fountain pen is very different than drawing a picture.

“The average [picture] has maybe 500 different lines, so the pen leaves the paper 500 times and starts a new line,” Stoyle said. “With [the Declaration], I think the pen leaves the paper 20,000 or more times… It follows the outline of every tiny little character there and then fills it in. That part of filling it in is just painstaking.”

The process is what matters

In the three months it has been up, the wall painting has generated scores of works; they usually take a day or two to complete and then stay up for a day or two. You can scroll through past works via the QR code inside the frame.

The Declaration will take about 30 hours of continuous drawing, Richard said. The plotter is turned off when the shop is closed, which is why it will take a week to be completed.

Once the Declaration is done, what will happen to it? That has yet to be decided.

“That is the question that everybody asks: ‘What do you do with these things?’ People think it’s really cool, but it’s cool when it’s in its venue. When you take it out of the frame, the lighting, I’m skeptical. People think I’d love to have that but I think, ‘Really?’” said Stoyle.

The true appeal, he said, is the process of creation as much as the final product. Watching the pen jump around as it dots the i’s in “unalienable rights” or add shading to the eyes of a tiger is a unique experience.

“It’s gotten a crazy reaction,” said Alex. “We’ve heard that a lot of people have ‘plotter FOMO,’ fear of missing out, if they don’t come in that day they’re afraid of missing out of what it’s drawing that day.

“It’s really a living experiment, a living, breathing piece of art that can change by the day.”