Dreaming Spirals

I just finished a Gocco printing session and have put photos up on Facebook (in case it gets too boring here on the blog!!). They’re on my Facebook profile and I’ll put them on my Facebook shop page as well which is open to general viewing.

A few weeks ago, Guenther Panenka of www.patchworkshop.de sent me a sample of a plastic frame he had developed which will fit in the Print Gocco machine to enable its use with unframed thermofax mesh.  He also sent me a few different carbon pencils.  So yesterday, I decided to give them a go!  I had a play with the pencils, shown below:

This is my original image:

I decided to stick with my reeds imagery.  The lighter, thicker marks were made with a Koh-i-noor Gioconda charcoal pencil and the thinner darker lines with a Phano china marker no 77 black.  I flashed it on to some unframed mesh and attached it to Guenther’s frame:

This is the frame – you’ll see that it is the same shape as the Riso hi-mesh screens so it fits in the machine well.  It is thin and flexible and went into the slots easily.

When attaching the screen, it is best to have a hi-mesh screen alongside to make sure you attach it the same way round!  I didn’t do this the first time so had a bit of reattaching to do!

I placed double sided tape all round the edges of the plastic frame and then stuck the mesh to it.  I then stuck sellotape along the two long sides and a small amount on the straight bits of the short sides.   For the plastic sheet which encloses the ink, I cut a rectangle off a cellophane bag and stuck it on to the relevant edge with double sided tape.  All this worked perfectly while I was printing.

I inked it up and put it into the machine:

Here are some of the results:

I think this last one was just after I had reinked it…

I plan to overprint these with various images, but you can see the amount of detail compared with the original image.  I was using 70 mesh thermofax screen – you can get 100 which is finer, but i don’t have any.   Sometime I will give it a go with a more detailed image to see how the 70 mesh holds up.

I also overprinted a few other prints:

And I printed a few reeds two or even three times on top of each other:

I could see these working well as a background.

And overprinted some decorated papers…
One thing to remember is to use ink blocking to keep the ink within the frame – this is a good idea always because it keeps the ink inside the printing area and saves ink, but especially with the plastic frames which are non absorbent – you don’t want ink in the slots of your Print Gocco!

If you want to order the plastic screens, go to www.patchworkshop.de and click on the top dropdown box in the left sidebar.  Scroll down nearly to the bottom and you will see it says Print Gocco. Click ‘go’ and it will take you there.    The site is in German but if you click the contact box you can email Guenther in English.

Guenther has also got a webpage with lots of hints for using his thermofax machines, a lot of which is relevant to Print Gocco users.  And he says that “the new Gocco-successor called A5 internally is (slowly but surely) developing”.

Last year I traced part of a medieval woodcut print of a cityscape using one of the Dover books, and made it into a Gocco screen.  I’m not sure that the screen I made was very successful because I didn’t shade it enough to give it dimension and the resultant prints just weren’t very clear.   I printed several Moleskine journals with it and put them in my Etsy shop.  Here is one so you can see what I mean:

Actually this one is even more unclear because I used white ink and gold embossing powder!   But I did do some with white ink on black which wasn’t much better.

Anyway, they’re not like that anymore!  This afternoon I got the watercolour paints out and highlighted a few of the features, I hope more successfully:

Here’s a close up of that last picture:

I also tried a different sort of highlighting on the black one:

I did this one with a silver pen.

I stamped this one with my angel stamp as I think she looks pretty medieval too!   

These are all for sale in my shop on Etsy, by the way.  What do you think? Does my colouring improve them or spoil them?

There’s a wonderful Print Gocco commercial on YouTube… look for the puppy printing with his paws!

I got out my Print Gocco machine for the first time in ages and did some printing. 

I took this photo of the steam train on the Ffestiniog railway during our holiday to Porthmadog in North Wales last summer.

I can’t remember which station it was, but I was up on the footbridge at the time.  We broke our journey between Porthmadog and Blaenau Ffestiniog and had a short walk through the woods, catching the next train back. 

I printed another one on a Moleskine cahier and this time put some bronze embossing power along the railway lines, and heated it with my heat gun.

I also did a load more birdie prints, this time in browns and golds:

This one is printed on khadi paper.

And another one with embossing powder on a Moleskine journal:

Of course, I couldn’t stop there and there are piles more cards! Including these little birdie heads:

This is just a quick reminder that I still have about 8 fabric bundles for sale… and as a way of clearing some space in my studio the next person in the UK to buy some can have 3 bundles for the price of 2! Just pay with the Paypal buttons for two and email me to let me know which other one you want and I’ll mark them as sold. I’ll post on here when they’ve gone. You can find them here. This offer will expire at midnight on Wednesday 3rd June.

And I also have a number of Print Gocco machines for sale – I haven’t got any B6 machines but I have several PG10s and PG10 Supers. They are on my Print Gocco machines page.

If you haven’t the foggiest what I’m talking about, there’s a page of links about the Print Gocco here.

This is a card I printed with it. I really must get it out and print some more… they really are addictive once you get going!