This is a pattern I printed with my Print Gocco Arts machine. This was one of those projects that turned out to be a good learning experience. Not that I made a lot of mistakes, but rather experienced quite a bit of trial and error. I learned some interesting things about the gocco machine, and also my computer in the process.
I like this pattern. I hand drew it from sketches, then scanned it and meticulously traced it in illustrator. I set up the file to have crop marks that would cut down to make an A2 sized card entirely covered by the pattern. Maybe the illustrator tracing wasn’t exactly necessary, but it was good practice, plus I wanted to test and see if my printer has carbon based ink.
If my inkjet did have carbon based black ink (which apparently some but not all inkjets have), then the printout would have burned the gocco screen quite nicely.
Lesson #1: My inkjet does NOT have carbon based black ink. The screen did not burn, and I wasted 4 good bulbs, but I suppose I had to try it once anyway to see if it would work.
So the next step was to go to kinkos to make a copy of the inkjet printout on the laser copiers which do indeed have carbon based toner.
I set up again to make a screen with my fresh laser prints. I was careful to use a blue filter as was suggested everywhere on the web when burning a screen from a laser print. This time only 3 of 4 bulbs flashed. Rats.
Lesson #2: Be very careful when screwing in the bulbs; make sure the contact is really good. I read a tip to kind of scratch the bottoms of the bulbs on a piece of paper before inserting them into the flash housing. When I did this, it left a gray residue on the sheet of paper, so maybe it cleans off some gunk, allowing for a better connection.
Finally I tried again, and got the screen to burn successfully. Sort of. I’m actually happy with the way it turned out, but if you refer to the image above, you will notice a distinct texture in the black of the pattern, which wasn’t a part of the original design, but rather an affect of the gocco process.
Lesson #3: I read somewhere that if you don’t use the blue filter with laser prints, you can get more even texture in solid areas.
I have yet to try this, but hopefully I can work it out so that I don’t always have to contend with the texture. As much as I liked the results in this project, I’d like to be able to print a nice solid area of color when I want.
When I initially printed the pattern, I used white ink on various colors of paper.
With white ink on paper, the texture was even more subtle, though it did create a nice amount of depth and detail I hadn’t anticipated.
All in all I printed about 175 cards in 2 sessions. About 150 of them were white ink, the rest were black ink. For the first batch I only printed about 30 cards before running out of ink!
Lesson #4: Print Gocco is great, but it takes a lot of ink, especially if you have an image that covers most of the screen with a lot of open area to be printed.
I ordered 5 more tubes of white ink, and had them in a few days. I think I loaded up the screen with 2 more tubes of ink before continuing the printing. The great thing about gocco screens is that you can pop them in a plastic bag and into the fridge if you run out of time or ink to finish the print run. Then just take it out and let it de-chill a bit, add ink if you want, and then continue printing.
To print the black, I used the same screen. I scraped off as much of the white ink as I could and stored it in empty film canisters (they are air tight!). Then I inked the screen with black ink, not bothering to really clean all the white ink off. Within 4 prints, the gocco was printing nice solid black without a trace of white.
I finished up, and then it was just a matter of drying the cards, cutting them, folding them, and ordering envelopes to go with them. Or so I thought.
Turns out that all the cards printed out 1/8 of an inch larger than I’d designed them to be on each side. That made them the exact size of the envelopes they were designed to go in, which basically means that they won’t fit.
It’s not the end of the world. I’d already cut and folded the 30 cards from the first batch, so they might be a lost cause, but with some tricky cutting I can probably maintain the integrity of the pattern at it’s borders (especially on the front of the cards). Hopefully the odd cropping won’t be obvious, but if it is, I won’t try to sell them, or I’ll discount them heavily, or make my friends take them.
Although it’s an issue I can work around, I wanted to find the source of the problem, and soon I discovered it.
Lesson #5: Apparently Illustrator prints everything 1/8 of an inch bigger on each side when printing to my inkjet printer. Subsequently, I also discovered that InDesign seems to print things 1/16 of an inch smaller on each side, but I can live with that more easily, so I think InDesign will be my new favorite program to print from.
Now I have about 150 cards in my studio ready to be trick-cut, but I haven’t brought myself to do it just yet. Hopefully I’ll do it soon, and then I’ll comment on the results if necessary.
Overall it was rather frustrating at times, but also fun, and I feel much better prepared and informed for my next gocco adventure.
