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So, the gang over at the Yahoo Gocco Group issued a project fest last week, saying “Do something on the Gocco in the next two weeks.”

I’ve had a couple of projects pending, including this one:

The original inspiration for this piece appeared over ten years ago; I’ve been kicking around the basic design for a while, but never found the right implementation medium.

The above is the original, generated in Photoshop. Sure, I could print these out by the hundreds, but they wouldn’t have the same feel and individual uniquity that the hand-printed versions would, so I’m going through the effort.

Part of the problem is that my Gocco printer doesn’t have a registration table; because I have to separate out each of the colors (mastering and printing them separately), there’s lots of opportunity for things to get out of alignment and start to look like crap.

I’ve been thinking about the problem for a while, and I think I have the solution:

I found these framer’s corners at Blick. They’re clear, sturdy and self-sticking. As you can see in the above picture, I’ve taken one of my target medium and secured it to the platform, with two of the framer’s corners set up on the sheet.

This will ensure that as I put each original on the platform, that they each are aligned as needed. This worked pretty much as planned, except over time, the corners got a little loose and stretched out, and they allowed more wiggling about than I was hoping for…

This is the first color, mastered and ready to print. I learned the ink-blocking trick from Scott Saw; I use it primarily to prevent ink from running all over the master.

I notice also that when I dam in the ink with the blocker, that the master doesn’t require quite as much pressure to get the same quality of output. Here’s one of the first green master outputs:

Gocco masters can be stored, by wrapping them in cellophane and putting them in the fridge. I’ve discovered there’s a certain size of Ziploc baggie that is perfect for the B6 masters:

Here’s a print after the second pass–blue:

And the third pass–red:

Even with my newfangled framer-corner technique, there were still some registration problems–if you look closely at the print on the right (above), you can see the red “a” floating above the line with the green and blue. This was despairing at first, but when the final print came together, most of the moving around and registration issues became either moot, or if anything, they added to the handmade feel and funkiness.

Here’s the black master (the final one) ready to go:

Again, I was shocked at how well it came together once the black ink was laid down:

Here’s one of the final prints with all of the colors, but no black yet:

Again, I’m really happy with how the experiment turned out; there are definitely 50 usable prints in the 74 I finally ended up with. Later this week, I’ll try another project that’s been pending for quite a while…

Final:

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under blog, screenprint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.