Sunday, June 20, 2010

Inifinite Loop, picturesque chickens, and gocco fail!




Infinite Loop

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood.

I couldn't stop making these mazes, and so now I have six. This is all six mazes stacked up, creating an infinite loop. I haven't permanently attached them to each other yet, but most likely will eventually.

The neighbors got 3 hens a while back and they seem to enjoy my yard quite a bit. I'm happy to have them around, hoping that they'll do a good job of eating my slugs and fertilizing my plants.




On the Gocco fail...

I've been wanting to try pressure printing on the Gocco for a while now. This is a very successful technique in letterpress printing that allows you to print with a fair amount of detail just by inserting something behind your paper and printing it against a flat sheet of inked plexi on the print bed.

I thought I'd try the technique and see if it works. So here's the setup—a simple design cut out in fairly thick fun foam, an open screen that has some texture in it, papers of various thickness.



I inked up my open screen, stuck the fun foam design on the print bed, and placed the paper on top of the fun foam and printed as normal. And as you see to the right of the fun foam design, what I printed was the entire inked up area. The design was no where to be seen.

I also tried it by placing the fun foam design between the plexi staging glass and the screen. That achieved more or less the same result.

Back to the drawing board...

3 comments:

Michael5000 said...

I don't think it counts as a "fail" if you are experimenting and you learn from it, even if what you learn is that something won't work like you hoped it would.

Which makes this a fail fail.

Catherine Alice said...

Hey Shu-Ju - I have done A LOT of pressure printing, and have never been able to make it work on a clamshell style printing press, nor has anyone I know. I have never done gocco. That said, if you keep experimenting, you might try a solid piece of foam and put your design on top of that, both under the paper. There just seems to be something about the rolling over that makes it work, and the clamshell smacking not. If you figure it out, I would love to know!

fingerstothebone said...

Catherine! How interesting! I wonder why that is...ok, now I have some data points to work with.