anika mari

I’ve been in Saipan now for about 2 and a half weeks. I’ve been feeling very stuck about what to do lately, artistically speaking.  I have been focusing my attention to look out for inspiration for something to draw.  Patterns. doodles. little creatures or plants. something. anything.  I was gathering some visuals and inspiration from my environment and experiences, but it felt so deliberate and forced, that I never could bring myself to sit down to actually draw something.  At some point I was sitting on the patio, staring at some palm trees, thinking about nothing in particular, and I thought to myself, “why don’t you just do prints?”

Ding, ding, ding!

The words were in my head before I envisioned what kind of prints I should do, but the ideas followed right away.  In my earlier explorations of the yard, I had found a fallen palm frond from a betel nut palm. The bottom of the stem is quite wide, and the texture was supple enough that I had plans to cut out shapes and do a version of my sewn leaves (I still just might do that!).  That original idea easily translated into using those shapes to create prints. I found some of the material, but it was dryer than before, so I was doubtful that I could make it work.  I searched around the yard to look for another frond or other material, and I found some interesting fibrous matter from the coconut palms.  It was also pretty dry, so then I got a clue from basket making–maybe I could soak the materials and bring back some of the flexibility, plus that might help the watercolor paint get soaked up better.

With nothing to lose if the material I collected disintegrated or worse, I plunged the stuff into a big bowl I’d filled with water.  I let it soak while I gathered the rest of my materials to work outside under the carport. I set up my workspace on the little wooden table and was soon ready to try out a print.

For my first attempt I worked with some of the coconut palm fiber.  Some of the material that was older, did indeed disintegrate, but for the fresher fiber, the water worked wonders. Not only did it make it more flexible, it also helped to clean off some of the dust and debris. I cut the material in the way it wanted to be cut, and what I ended up with looked a bit like a shrimp.  I laid the fiber on some watercolor paper and applied red watercolor paint. The fiber soaked up the paint and held it pretty well.

I carefully moved the paint heavy fiber to a fresh sheet of watercolor paper and I made my first print.

Obviously I had painted the background in a blue wash before applying the print. It dulled the red down, plus those two longer strands of red on the right looked weird and very un-shrimplike. I think it looks more like a prehistoric bird fish.

I had to adjust the shape of the fiber and the amount of paint a bit, but eventually I ended up with one print that I am very pleased with that actually looks somewhat like a shrimp!

As I was making the prints I realized is that by placing the fiber on a piece of paper to apply the paint, I create another painting that is similar in shape but has quite a different texture.

The water had finally brought the dry brittle betel nut fiber to life. I tried my scissors on a small section from the larger piece, and I could cut it easily and precisely. For my next two prints, I cut leaf/petal shapes from the thicker betel nut material.

For the first of these prints, I applied purple paint to the fatter shape and made one print.  It was alright, but it didn’t pick up any of the texture.  For the next try, I used a little less paint and printed on the same sheet of paper. I continued making prints of the leaf/petal shape on the same piece of paper in shades of purple.

The next print used the skinny pieces that I’d cut from the betel nut palm fiber.  I used all five pieces and printed them several times in various shades of green. I wasn’t as happy with the outcome, but I have an idea to cut up the print and incorporate those pieces into a collage combined with some drawn textures.

When I was creating the green print, I rested the cut pieces on a piece of watercolor paper, as I did when working on the shrimp print. The result was quite different from the print.

I think the shapes look like little pods, so I’m going to fill each space with some kind of drawing since right now it looks too empty to me.

Overall, it was a fun and satisfying project. Since I used my fingers to handle the paint-covered cut outs, my fingertips were covered with paint by the end of the process. I don’t love that, so before I try any more prints with this technique I’m going to see if I can find some surgical gloves to protect my skin from the potentially yucky stuff that’s in the paint.

A few weeks back I screen printed some t-shirts for my brother’s 24 hour bike relay race team with my handy gocco printer.  They are the Posse of Mustached Bandits. My brother came up with the logo, though I tweaked it a bit to make it a more solid and balanced mark.

It was my first time printing on fabric, and the technique was quite a bit different than printing on paper. I had to use a squeegee (with the paper process you can press your prints using the machine). It was very easy and went quickly, even if it was a bit messy.

I had a few little slip-ups here and there, but I got 4 decent shirts out of 6. The other two were sorta ok, with only one errant splotch on each.

There was a bit of unevenness in the solid black areas, but I think that could be helped if I get a better surface to mount the shirts on.

To see the detail and the unevenness more closely, view the image large.

I used some spare cardboard that was lying around to mount the shirts on before printing so the ink wouldn’t bleed through to the back of the shirt. Unfortunately the cardboard was very soft, and as I drew the squeegee over the screen, I could feel each bump as it ran over the ridges. If I had a flat hard board of some sort, the print might be more even, though I’ll have to test that theory.

Placement of the logo on the shirts is another thing I might want to consider more carefully next time. I pretty much just eyeballed each shirt, so the marks weren’t in the exact same place for each. I printed 2 large and 4 medium shirts, and when folded and stacked up, it’s evident that they are each unique.

All in all I’m satisfied with the results of my first try, and I can’t wait to try it again!

This was my very first gocco print!  I used the ink blocking material to print the eyes and the body at the same time.

I printed a total of eight.  Four on yellow paper, four on blue.

I drew the image with the pen that came with the gocco machine, and although it works well to burn the screen, I didn’t love the feel of drawing with it.  It ate up the paper and left little bits of it behind, like the the markers I used when I was little.  I hear micron pens work great, which is awesome for me since I use them all the time.  I’ll be using those for the next print I make.

It was a whole lot of fun, and I look forward to doing more.

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.