Experimental gocco print, day 1

With this print, I'm refining some of the techniques I first tried with Fatherland, and also trying some new techniques.

First shot: This was a used screen -- the yellow screen from the Dentistry print (a cmyk print). You can see the screen is still stained from the process yellow, but the screen is clean. I used white paper tape to block out an area 3+" x 7" and inked up with a custom mixed yellow and some of the pastel yellow straight out of the tube. And in this case, I put the ink on rather thinly because I wanted the unpredictable drop outs. This is just an under layer.



The resulting print:



Getting ready to print the next layer. This screen was also a used screen, but it's a completely open screen, ie, I flashed it with a solid black copy. I used this for many of the background shapes in Fatherland; you can still sort of see the shapes. Here I've blocked out the borders:



I just drew circles with the ink out of the tube; this is one of the techniques I've been meaning to try. Here's the screen in the gocco:



Then I cleaned it up. And in this case, since the screen is completely open, I do use Windex to clean it (no worries about pin holes), so it's completely degreased and ready to be used again. Then I used white paper tape to block out another area, and drew ovals with the ink out of the tube, in orange:



This last shot was something that I hadn't tried before, and in fact, just thought of as I was doing this -- I smeared ink on the screen with a rubber spatula. The ink is very thin, and I could only print 5-6 prints before I had to re-ink it. But here's one print:



Tomorrow, I will layer over the left side where the magenta, orange, and red areas are. These are just there to create the texture for the under layer. At least that's the idea. We'll see how it works tomorrow.

Bought a coil binding machine on ebay today. The project I'm proposing to do with the kids at the Q Center involves them each printing a page and then the class making a coil bound book from all the printed pages. Plus I can use it too, of course.