We are pen plotter artists and creative technologists.

Our maker studio encompasses 3D printing, vinyl cutting, crafting, electronics, and digital design, with an Open Source ethos.

Heidi Blanton

Heidi Blanton is a User Experience Designer, researcher, and professional genealogist whose interests span research, genealogy, design, and crafting. Her studies in Music and Library and Information Science, along with a Postgraduate Diploma in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies from the University of Strathclyde, inform her approach. Her background in these areas shapes her process, whether she's designing a website or tracing family histories. Each project draws on methods from librarianship, genealogy, and design, tailored to the task at hand.

At Wimbledon Art Studios, where she works alongside her husband, Heidi combines software, machinery, and hands-on techniques. Using pen plotters, crafting machines, and digital tools, she creates drawings and prints that often begin as digital concepts or datasets and become ink on paper or other materials.

Heidi has a background in libraries and lives in London. Her client work spans advertising, medicine, and finance, but her main focus is on how people seek out, interpret, and trust information and technology. She runs Sapphire Stream, a UX consultancy, and heidi go seek, her genealogy practice, collaborating with clients in the UK and abroad on research and communication projects. As a volunteer UX Designer with Free UK Genealogy, she helps ensure important UK family history records remain freely available online.

Andy Piper

Andy Piper is a pen plotter artist, technologist, educator, writer and public speaker. He holds a Master of Arts in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford, and is self-taught in coding and technology.

Andy's love of computers began in the 1980s, with 8-bit machines and a first hardware hack involving a pair of Walkman headphones and an Acorn Electron. That early curiosity still shapes his work today: exploring the space between code, machines, open technology and physical making.

His creative practice connects algorithmic art, computer history and drawing machines. Using pen plotters, software, electronics and fabrication tools, Andy explores how abstract systems become material: ink on paper, motors in motion and traces of code made visible.

Professionally, Andy has spent three decades helping people understand and use technology. He spent 10 years as a technical consultant at IBM, then built an international reputation in developer advocacy, public speaking, communications and open technology at organisations including VMware, Twitter and Mastodon. Most recently, as Head of Communications at Mastodon, his work focused on open standards, EU technology policy and the future of an open, interoperable internet.

Andy co-hosts the weekly podcast Games at Work dot Biz, and is co-organiser of HackWimbledon, a pop-up hackspace in Wimbledon. He was named in OpenUK's New Year's Honours 2023 as one of the UK's top social influencers in open technology. He continues to write, speak, mentor and make around open source, digital culture, creative coding, retro computing and the social web.