Gocco Success! HOORAY

Wow. What a highly thrilling moment!
Apparently the problems I was having burning a good screen was a mixture of moisture in the paper, and excess carbon. This was collectively solved by ironing the photocopy (regular iron with no steam) covered with a sheet of baking paper to remove excess carbon. Simple as that. I had two dud prints at the start and I was off to the races. Apologies for ordinary photos with this post. I struggle to get things right with the light in my studio...



I'd read that it was important to be liberal with ink...and I was!



It was SO TRUE about being liberal with ink. I printed about 100 of these without even the slightest hint I was running out of ink.



I ran out of SPACE to put the prints before running out of ink! Guess those Gocco card drying racks might have been a good investment after all! I spent a bit of time worrying about my cat coming to investigate when the tables in my studio looked like this!



What an awesome little unit. I'm so glad I didn't flog it off on ebay when I had ordinary results last year. Want to know more about gocco? Read about it here or there!

Gocco Long Weekend

I was horrified to note that my last GOCCO experiment was the Queen's Birthday LAST YEAR. Gasp! The good news is that I did purchase some more supplies around Christmas...but have not yet found (made?) time to actually continue my experiments. I couldn't possibly let another YEAR go by without progressing so I decided to use the Queen's Birthday THIS YEAR to dabble once more.
I pitched a cross-continental collaboration with my very talented friend Christina who lives in Canada: a series of quotes (her words and my designs), printed using Gocco, onto postcards. She held up her end of the bargain and gave me lots of inspirational words. My deadline of 31 January 2011 made that awesome WHOOSHING sound as it whipped by. My excuse? I went to the Australian Open! OK that accounts for the week of January 31, the other five months? I got nothin.
SO given I still have not had a decent print from my Gocco, I thought I'd tackle that challenge before pitching my designs to her. One of her suggestions was a series of cards that say simply "hello friend".
So here is what I will print on Monday:


Birdy has no legs coz I plan to draw those later. Cheating with one screen, you see.

And I like this one too:


I am going to try to keep this to one screen too: block around the spider and then draw the thin web strand after.
That is, if I can burn a good master. Fingers crossed!
I'll keep you posted. I promise.
PS Thanks to Lara and Nic for their tips re: Gocco from my last post...A YEAR AGO! Yikes.