Dreaming Spirals

I have recently joined Twitter, which is a sort of micro-blogging cum social networking, some would say time wasting, online phenomenon. 

Twitter is a type of online text messaging where you write very short messages (up to 140 characters) of whatever is going through your mind at that particular time.  You can opt to ‘follow’ other Twitters (or should that be ‘twitterers’?) and they can follow you.  I use an add-on for Firefox so that any tweets (the word for each individual message) pop up as they arrive and there’s a box for writing your own message too, so it makes it easy.   You can reply, either privately or publicly, to people’s tweets too.  I like it because I hear about the minutae of people’s lives and it breaks up my day a bit.   

If you’re wondering whether this is all worth it, pop over to Lisa Call’s blog.

I’ve been reading Lisa’s blog for a few years now, ever since we moved over to Wordpress at the same time and hauled each other through the obstacles associated with moving blogs and learning new software.    I always find her posts well thought out  and worth reading.  Today she wrote a post called 10 reasons why I might want to tweet instead of make art.    If you want to know more about Twitter, she promises to write another post outlining how she uses it.

If you Tweet and want to follow me, there’s a widget in the sidebar with the link (and my last Tweet), or go to my Twitter profile and click on ‘follow’.

Now, just don’t ask me why I’m on Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr… and no doubt several others I’ve forgotten about!

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I put away the Gocco machine on Friday and did some printing on fabric for a change. 

First of all, inspired by Rayna Gillman’s book, Create Your own Hand Printed Cloth, which by the way is gorgeous, I did some printing with the base of some of those plastic meat trays which supermarkets feel it is necessary to send with any meat (don’t get me started on overpackaging, but now I’ve found a way to recycle it I don’t feel so guilty!).  I then overprinted this with a couple of gocco screens. 

I space dyed this fabric in a cat litter tray last year.

The fabric is not quite so vivid as it seems and the colours are mixed together a bit more but you get the idea.  The background printing was done in red fabric paint from Trapsuutjies.  The gocco print of the people was based on a photo taken at the chateau de Blois last year in France and the other is of a brick wall.

I also overprinted this fabric which I discharged earlier this year:

And this blue fabric with the ‘bricks’ screen:

I’m also going to join in Maggie Grey’s Grand Catalogue Distressing Ritual.  For the mystified, Maggie has a new book out soon and she is offering free online classes for anyone who buys the book.    To prepare for one of the classes, she asks us to take an Argos catalogue or telephone directory or similar, slash the cover deeply and put it out in the garden to await its fate by any passing wildlife or weather.  Like several other people, I decided to help it along by soaking it first:

And ever since Maggie told us to do that, the summer has started!  No rain in sight…. long may it continue.

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Sorry for the lack of posts in the last week.  I went down with a heavy cold and lost the impetus to do any more than read emails and blogs.

However, I did get up the enthusiasm to do some Gocco printing.  As I said a few posts ago, I’m taking part in a swap, my very first Gocco swap and it’s exciting!  I decided to alter a photo of the terraced houses in Newport where I live.  I did it in two screens, the first to give blocks of colour and the second to provide an outline.  I used Paint Shop Pro for this and converted the photo into a pencil sketch using the Effects menu. 

Here is the first printing: for some reason I made the screen upside down so all these cards are upside down to help me remember to overprint them the right way round (fortunately, both the screens were upside down or I would have got VERY confused!

This is how it looks after the first printing, without an outline:

And this is what it looks like after the second printing:

All drying in the racks:

I also printed another screen.  When we were in France we visited Rouen and outside the cathedral there, there was a display about all the artists who had represented the cathedral, the most well known of whom is Monet.  I decided to do some Gocco prints of the cathedral in various colours… I’ve only done red so far but here it is:

And I also printed on a watercolour pad which I’d previous painted with blue paint:

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I have been doing a lot of this recently so I thought I’d write a post about it.  Basically, the idea is to use photos with high contrast and to use photo editing software to take all the grey out and just leave black and white.  When printed with a laser printer, the black areas are full of carbon which is heated up when the Gocco bulbs flash, then they stick to the Gocco screen, melt the plastic and expose the screen in those areas.

I use Paint Shop Pro 10.01 so these screenshots come from that.  You can use Photoshop and probably other software too.

This is one of the photos I used.

They are some of the houses in the Slate Museum that we visited at Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales.  It has pretty good contrast - darks and lights.  I opened it in Paint Shop Pro and clicked on Adjust - Brightness and Contrast - Threshold.

This was the first result I got from that.  I thought that was too dark so I decreased the number in the box a bit.

That was better (97 is the number in the box for this second try).

However, large dark areas do tend to get splotchy and detail gets lost so I thought I’d decrease it a bit more, to 81 in the box.  That was better, so here is the result:

I haven’t actually printed this yet but I’ll let you know how it works!  This one would be best for the hi-mesh framed screens for paper (though you could use them to print on fabric as well).  I have found myself mostly using the unframed film for repeat textures and patterns.  Here is one such example, a photo of an unusual manmade “waterfall” at Villandry in the Loire Valley in France where we holidayed last year.

This is the image I came up with after playing with it in Paint Shop Pro using the above process.  Again I haven’t actually printed it yet but I can see it giving an interesting texture on fabric…

If you’re looking for a Print Gocco machine and live in the UK, I still have some B6 machines to sell. I have sold all the PG10s, though.

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Last week we were on holiday in Normandy in France.    It has some very picturesque and distinctive houses:

And even a painted water tower!

One day we hired bikes…. and felt the results!  Near where we stayed there was a ‘voie verte’, a green way, which is a tarmacked path off road where we cycled.  I took some of these photos whilst cycling along - clever, eh?!

Here is DS2 ahead of me.

Tired but happy…

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I’ve just signed up to participate in Lisa’s Gocco Swap!

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