Two years and nine months later...

We have a book!

This was the book I started with an elderly WWII vet back at the start of 2009. His wife heard about the project I did at Rose Schnitzer Manor and thought I might be interested in working with him. And now two years and nine months later, I have completed the project!

The book is an edition of 26, Gocco printed on Nepal Heavyweight, a handmade paper from Nepal; each also has 5 etchings on cotton paper handmade by Helen Hiebert.

Here's a stack of a few books. The cover paper is handmade mulberry paper from Taiwan. The image is Gocco printed and then brushed with a foam brush.



The front & back covers, and the back of the accordion. The back cover is created using the same method as the front cover.



Detail on the back of the accordion. It's the melody from San Antonio Rose. If you know the song, you can follow along. Otherwise, it might just look like a landscape or the water.



The opening pages.



The first trifold. The brown paper with the etching is made by Helen and contains soil from the South Dakota farm that he was born and raised in.



The trifold opened up.



The second trifold. The blue paper with the etching contains water from the Pacific Ocean.



The trifold opened up.



The third trifold. The green-blue paper with the etching contains water from the Columbia River.



Opened.



The fourth trifold. The gray-blue paper with the etching contains water from the Willamette River.



Opened.



The last trifold. The brown paper with the etching contains soil from his Oregon farm.



Opened.



The closing pages.

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...

Floating plum blossom...

Well, that's what it looks like to me anyhow. It actually looked a lot better before I had to run off to grab the camera. I had the brita filter turned up side down and was rinsing the outside when I saw the suds on the bottom on the inside. By the time I grabbed the phone camera, I had lost half of the blossoms.

So probably the biggest 'excitement,' if you can call it that, was that I taught my last beginning Gocco class yesterday! At the Atelier Meridian, as a fundraiser for Print Arts Northwest. It was in a giant warehouse style print shop. Lots of large presses of all kinds. It was a cavernous space.

I am actually pretty happy to be finished with teaching beginning Print Gocco—it's hard to teach it when I know the participants will not be going home to make more prints. I used to hand out copious amounts of class notes, templates, etc, but I haven't done that ever since the supplies became harder to get and more expensive.

And today was the all day Portland Open Studios planning retreat, which happen twice a year. So that was a long day.

The other big excitement was that I delivered several pieces to 23 Sandy this week. Laura had had a couple of my artist's books in inventory for a while, but now she has some paintings too!

I'm still slowly grinding dirt for my senior's book. The papermaking isn't going to happen until Jan (as Helen's schedule dictated), so that kind of allowed me to relax a bit too.

The struggle may (or may not) be over

So there it is, the text printed, the leaves printed. I'm not sure that I'm so happy about it. It took me three ink mixes before I found the right color for the darker color of the leaves. I wanted the colors to move, ie, to not be so perfectly registered, so that the leaves looked like they were quaking in the wind. I don't think I like the result though.

So I made 2 more screens today, to give the leaves a bit more definition, and after printing up a few more, I decided I liked that even less. So here I am, leaving well enough alone, for now. See this entry for where it was before I added the text and the darker color of the leaves.

Now I'm back to finish prepping my 7x7 boards.

We have progress on the broadside

After printing my first pressure print layer on the letterpress at Diane's last Wednesday, it took me 3 tries before I had a plate that I was happy with for the 2nd layer. In the process, I completely destroyed the plate for the 1st layer, so that's officially cancelled.

My first attempt, using pva on cardstock, buckled the paper. My 2nd attempt, again pva on cardstock only this time I pressed it between release paper under bricks, I tried to lift up the release paper a bit too early and completely peeled off a layer of the paper. The 3rd time, I left it under bricks for overnight and that was ok.

I printed this layer at home, and had a heck of a time achieving any kind of a control over the situation. Everytime I changed the packing, things changed in ways totally different from what I was expecting. Everytime I inked up (with very little ink), the next print got way darker, and then 2 prints later, it seemed like I needed to ink up again.

I went through my 56 sheets of paper and it wasn't clear to me that I was going to get 40 good prints for the edition. But at this point, I really can't start over again.

I took a break from the broadside on Sunday, then on Monday I added the leaves and the white in the bark. So now there are 2 layers of pressure print on the letterpress (1st layer—gray & yellow background, 2nd layer—blue & orange over that), 2 layers on the gocco (the leaves & the bark).



Today, I looked at the bark and decided it needed to go white still, so there are now 2 layers of white over the bark, and here I'm printing the gray areas in the tree bark. The paper size measures 20"x13", so it's hanging over the edges of the gocco.



Now this is 2 layers of pressure print and 4 layers of gocco. I still have the text, patterns over the leaves, and maybe a rabbit to print.



The print is too large to dry on my drying racks, and I do like seeing them all lined up like this:

Relay Replay fundraiser print

After a couple of days of planning, I made the print today. This is the print I'm doing as a fundraiser to raise money to pay for materials and for me to go out and spend a week at The Dalles to work with another senior who lives out that way. His family lives in Portland and they have horses. I went out a few weeks ago and took a bunch of photos of their horses and used those as sources for this print. [I should add that these are Gocco prints, but of course...]

Here's the first layer, basically a solid 6"x6" square with different areas inked up with what I have left of the watercolor inks. The white horse was blocked out with a self-adhesive stencil:



After the 2nd layer:



And as I was designing it, I really couldn't decide which version to go with, so I went with both:



I printed about 2/3 of the prints in the pastel color version, and the rest in the sepia toned version. Both prints have that old-fashioned look, which I'm really liking. I used the same two screens for both versions, one screen a solid 6"x6" area, and a second screen for the darker lines. I like that the solid is somewhat spotchy too. I decided to go with the splotchy screen rather than a good solid open screen that I have been using for a variety of other projects. I don't know, there's just something about those little bright spots, they look like snow flakes, or maybe flower petals floating through the air.

The design of the print came from these 2 photos. The two horses are a mother-daughter pair.

A productive week

My cohorts (Anne, Helen, and Diane) and I went up to Seattle for a couple of days. It was a whirlwind trip of visiting a binder, an artist, an antiquarian/rare books dealer, art galleries, the SAM's Sculpture Park, and the UW Special Collections. Wow, I can't believe we fit all that into 2 days, and that included driving up and back.

Visits to the binder and the UW Special Collections were just overwhelming, in a good way. There were SO MANY amazing books to absorb. Most of which will soon slip my memory, I know, but it was still a pretty amazing experience. The binder we visited keeps a copy of each book she has worked on, and has an incredible collection of books, some by pretty famous artists. What a gig!

And some good news—the UW Special Collections bought a copy of each of the books I took up to show, that includes one each of the Relay Replay books, Calypso, and S/N. And even more good news—I heard from Vamp & Tramp that they've sold 6 copies of Martha, which means Martha is now sold out (other than the 3 copies I'm keeping for myself). I'm both very happy & excited, but also wondering if that means I underpriced the book? Heck, pricing is an impossible task.

I was pretty out of it the day after we got back from Seattle, I think it just took me a whole day to decompress, there was so much to absorb. I did manage to make it to the Clemens-Tobias Lange talk at 23 Sandy—fabulous books, and even more inspiring, he does all the prints with photopolymer plates. And since I've been talking about getting a baby etching press and learning how to use solarplates (I'm pretty sure this is the same as photopolymer plates), I now have much to look forward to and learn.

And on finishing Superfoodland!

The backs of the cards:



The Fortunes:



The Fortunes are supposed to look like little chocolate squares. I printed on both the foil and paper, just in case the foil doesn't stick.

I'm definitely getting there. I've printed the booklet cover, too. I'm pretty close to finishing the rule book. I do need to print up the scorecards, but I think I'll inkjet those. So tomorrow, I laminate & trim the cards, add the '!' to the embroidered napkin, pack (and don't forget the die for the game!), and deliver the package to Anne in the evening.

I'm gonna make it!

This is the part that absolutely had to be done today, and I got it done. These are the faces of the cards to go with Superfoodland!, and because they're being printed over acrylic, it will take them days to dry. The backs of the cards and the 'fortune chips' (still haven't come up with a better name) can be printed after I get back from Seattle, that's not a problem.

I'm printing 4 of each card. Here one of the Shark's Fin cards is being lined up under the transparency. I'm using a screen that had been partially used for Marion, one of the Relay Replay books from last year:



All 15 cards (4 copies each) lined up on the drying boards:



Details of some of the cards:



And although I am getting this done just in time (finished at 10:45pm tonight), I haven't been avoiding it, not exactly. I've just had a bunch of other things that needed to get done too, and this actually required a lot of research time; and I did know I had until today to do this. Looking back at my timesheet, I've been clocking in at 45 hours a week since Jan 1 this year. Not too shabby!

OK, now I better go pack up my books for my Seattle trip tomorrow. Since they're one big reason why I'm going, wouldn't want to forget those.

Go...Go...Go...Gocco...Gone

After taking down the show at Hillsboro on Thursday, I stopped by at Laurie's to pick up what is essentially my last-time-buy of gocco supplies. I can still get the large screens as time goes buy, since there isn't so much demand for it, but as far as inks and the small screens go, I think I've bought all that I can.

On the bright side, I won't be spending so money on gocco supplies any more...

I do still have plenty to last me a while though, and I can still teach a few classes. Speaking of which, today was my first gocco class held in my newly expanded studio space. It is nice to be able to teach in the studio and not have to haul everything upstairs into the living room. This was the 2 session papermaking+gocco-printing workshop I co-taught with Helen. We still need to get together and evaluate how it went and what the results look like. Some of the inclusions (especially the plant ones) were coming up, sticking to the screen, so we'll have to nix that for future projects. Unfortunately, there was enough going on that I couldn't look at everyone's results very carefully. Hopefully, I can catch up with folks over email.

Teaching always takes a lot out of me. Probably because it's such intense/continuous people interactions for 3 hours straight, and it's really a bit too long for me to go without eating. After that, it just seems to take me a long while to recover.

On other fronts—haven't made further progress on the game board, but we embroidered the napkins (which are the labels to our place settings). There's been lots of little things for Portland Open Studios that have taken up some time, too. And I still haven't even done the board meeting minutes...better do that soon.

Superfoodland! Take 1

First thing first...Happy Chinese New Year of the Ox!

OK, it took me most of Friday to put 4 coats of gesso on the board, letting it dry between each coat, and then sanding it down. Of course, I'm doing other things in between, various Portland Open Studios related stuff (insurance, board stuff).

Then sadly, due to the dwindling gocco supplies, Saturday was the last Advanced Gocco class at IPRC. Between walking to the transit center, bussing in, teaching, and then doing the reverse commute, I was on my feet for about 7 and half hours. I was pretty pooped by the time I got home. And that was pretty much all that I managed on Saturday.

But today! Hah! Got a lot accomplished. Packed up boxes of books to go to Abecedarian and Vamp & Tramp, and actually managed to get started painting Superfoodland! (Yes, the '!' is now part of the title, per Gretchin's insistence upon it...)

Here it is with 3 coats of ocher on it, and I've penciled in the 'paths' and different locations where different things happen. It's a bit simplified from when I first wrote up the rules (feedback I got from the group was that it was too complicated). Here it is set up with the utensils:



And here's a detail with the penciled in paths:



It's hard to see in these pictures, but that's ok...the finished thing will look nothing like this anyhow. Probably most of the ocher won't show after I'm finished, except for a very thin line along the sides, which you can't see because I've taped it up in these photos.

The blueberry chips will go into a 'bowl' in the middle. I haven't figured out the construction of the bowl yet. Each gamer's won blueberry chips will go into smaller bowls along the sides. Again, don't know how I'll make those yet.

As I was looking at my calendar for the next couple of weeks, I noticed that it said 'installation' on Feb 3. Panic! I had no idea what show I was installing on that day! My brain raced, and for a few seconds, I really panicked. Then I remembered—the floor was being installed that day...

Ack! Oil spots!

I noticed today that, despite having washed and washed and cleaned the used gocco screens, and cleaned again with windex before I sandwiched them in between the plexi, some of the screens are forming oil spots! Argh.

So I've washed the remaining screens again, and here they are, drying in the bathtub...so pretty:



Of the ones already installed in the room divider, I'll let them be until after I bring the room dividers home and clean them again then.

Otherwise, the day was action packed. Had back to back interviews about the Relay Replay exhibit in the afternoon; then after dinner, went over to Laura's to pick out the pieces for Intersect/Parallel.

I hope I'm not getting sick; all evening, I've had stomach cramps, the kind you get when you're really hungry. Except this started after I had a rather satisfying dinner. And now I'm feeling kind of sick to my stomach too. Yuck.

But wait, there's more!

On gocco touch-ups, that is.

I touch each one up as they come off the press, so the ink is still fresh & wet and movable. This of course contributes to the backache because I'm staying in my printing position, just bent way over so I can see what I'm doing.

Onto Portland Open Studios Prep

I finally started printing cards and reproductions of my paintings today. I've resisted making inkjet reproductions of my paintings in the past, mostly because I really hate the common practice of people selling 'giclee' prints for what seems like a lot of money, and it's just an inkjet print, for heaven's sakes.

However, people have always asked for reproductions, and economy being what it is, I'm going over to the dark side. However, I refuse to call them 'giclee' prints. They're gonna be labeled as inkjet reproductions, and they're not going to cost an arm and a leg.

But it was pretty slow going. It takes a few tries before each one is reproduced anywhere close to their actual colors. And for some reason, when I convert to CMYK, I seem to have more difficulties getting the colors to match. So after close to 7 hours of computer/printer time, I have 25 good prints (and 10 bad ones). And I'm just now getting to print the cards. The good news is, I already have most of these set up correctly from previous years, so now I'm just baby-sitting the printer.

More on gocco touch-ups

Dr. Russ asked for more details on the gocco touch-ups, so here's a bit more info:

I use the same ink as I'm printing with, no thinning. If I'm using the ink straight out of the tube, then that's what I use to touch up. If I'm using ink I've saved (as was the case in the previous post), then I use that. If I am using ink that I've thinned (sometimes saved ink seems a little stiff, so I thin it with a drop of baby oil), then I use that same thinned ink.

Also, the brush has really very little ink on it. After I pick up some ink on the brush, I wipe as much of it off on the palette as I can. When I touch up, I'm very slowly building up the color. I might brush over the spot 6, 7 times, or more, before I get a coverage that matches the surrounding area. Occasionally I make mistakes, such as the one I made where there was more ink on the brush and the mistake showed as a stray line in the concentric circles. By having to build up very slowly, you reduce the chance that a single mistake will be very noticeable at all.

Also, I used a very tiny brush in this case (12/0), since I was dealing with really fine details. But I have several brushes of different sizes dedicated to touching up. Some are 3s and 2s. Just depends on what I'm doing.

Maybe I should make a video!

Now for something completely weird and unrelated.

I can get stressed out pretty easily, especially when I have so many different deadlines coming up in the next few weeks. Portland Open Studios is this coming weekend (and the weekend after), and I've NOT started to prepare. I'm mentally prepared—I know what I'm going to do, I just haven't done it yet.

Now normally, I would just have some obvious stress dream, like I'm trying to get something very simple done, but all kinds of things keep getting in the way and I can't accomplish anything. But last night, I didn't exactly dream, mostly because I didn't exactly fall asleep. I was in this semi awake state and I was very worried that I would find a yellow tabby stray cat covered in fleas.

I was fully aware that I did NOT actually have a stray cat, I was just worried that I might find one. And I kept on thinking what I would do to remove the fleas—what kind of shampoo, how should I go about shampooing it, etc. And then I would remember that I do, in fact, know exactly how to apply flea shampoo so I should stop worrying about it. But it was of no use.

I got up a few times, both to go to the bathroom and to try to clear my head a bit, but as soon as I got back into bed, the same thoughts came back—what if I found a yellow tabby covered in fleas?

MiT book, we have a cover!

Yes, the cover is printed. I thought this day would just about never come. But it wasn't without some back-breaking labor. I'll blame it on the change in the season, but the screen did not flash very cleanly today, I had several holes. It can be a little hard to tell what was a hole in the screen itself and what was a gap caused by the unevenness of the very lumpy handmade paper (Nepal Heavyweight). Lumpy paper, I could live with, but the obvious holes in the screens, I always touch up.

And touch-up jobs are definitely back-breaking.

So today's lesson is touching-up your gocco print

Before and after I touched up the missing spot in the scroll close to the bottom, and also at the corner:





Before and after I touched up the missing spot in the right leg of the 'H':





Before and after I touched up the obvious hole in the line at the bottom:



And here, well, I had some coffee after lunch, and I had a bit of a jiggle, you can see the result inside the outer most of the concentric circles (compare that to the picture above). I decided to live with it:



A shot of the cover:



The tools of the trade. I use a 12/0 acrylic/oil brush. And very little ink, if any at all. Usually, there's enough ink on the print itself and I just use the brush to spread it around to cover up the hole. But if I do need more ink, I dab up the tiniest bit of ink I can, then I wipe as much off as possible on the plastic lid (what I use for a palette):



Here are the 7 books I've finished; they're going to Esther and her family.



And on other fronts:

I'm starting work for the collaboration my critique group is doing for our show next March at Cedar Crest College. I picked up the fabric yesterday (100% cotton, white, 3 and half yards of it); laundered it, and today stained it with a big bucket of coffee grounds I picked up at the local coffee shop.

I wish I had gotten a shot of it while it was in its coffee bath, it was pretty disgusting looking. But anyhow, here I'm rinsing out the coffee. I think it's stained a bit darker than I'd like, so I'll probably run it through the washing machine again.



And whoa, Relay Replay blog got tagged as a spam blog!

I got a note from blogger today saying that the blog (http://relayreplaypress.blogspot.com/) had been tagged as a spam site, and therefore had been blocked! After looking at the long headers, I decided it was legit and so followed the link it said to follow in order to unblock it.

I don't know why google's software tagged it as a spam blog, but I have one guess—all the posts are titled with a woman's name, I wonder if they thought I was posting nudie photos or something?

MiT book, stalling for time

OK, I've been having a hard time coming up with words for this book. Part of the issue was that senior #4 was so very quiet! Her daughter was so helpful in getting this project completed—she brought over albums, documents, all kinds of things, and helped her mom choose what to print. But because the daughter was so engaging and so involved, I think my senior kind of sat back and just quietly printed. She & I didn't interact in the same ways that I interacted with the other seniors. On the other hand, she never would've completed the project had her daughter not been involved.

So in the mean time, at a loss for words (haha), I decided to just start adding more texture to my side of the prints. Not sure that you can tell the difference in the before (left) and after (right) pictures. The ones on the right have obviously been trimmed down to size and corners rounded (yay, corner rounder!). But they also have had blobs of white added to them randomly:



But I just thought of something—maybe I should not have any words, given that we didn't really have any conversations?

Here's another set. I've overprinted all 16 sets: