The weekend before last, I organized a printing workshop at a nearby hotel. Julie, aka The Jazz Pixie, joined along with her friend Carol who is new to altered books. They came all the way from England complete with a Gocco print machine in one of their suitcases!
Julie and I have traded mail art for about three years now, but never met in "real life." Admittedly, it was scary to meet in person when previously we only connected online in art groups. But I'm so happy we were brave enough to do it because we had a creative explosion of a weekend, a complete retreat from a "normal" world.
My experience with printing has been 4-color CMYK and monoprinting (one-color stamping or linoleum type hand printing). What a luxury to be introduced to screen printing!
This magical little machine of Julie's, together with my laser printer could image screens that made incredibly fine-quality prints. Naturally, I prepared some pretzels although Julie had to re-size my files in order to fit them to the screens.
Julie brought such an amazing selection of ink choices, I was able to print gold prezels, bronze pretzels, and experiment with red pretzels (which at some point started looking like lips). Having mostly cream and white card stock pre-cut to A5, it was still fun to try a few prints on assorted color papers as well as cut-to-size ATCs...
Because the Gocco machine manufacturer in Japan has gone out of business, the consumables are no longer readily availalbe. Julie was so generous sharing her bulbs and screens, even leaving me with a scraper-squeegie tool so that I can try hand printing the screens at home.
The black and white photo is a grayscale image of a pretzel arrangement and the brown photo is the print result! The last photo is three of the same pretzel, run through three different photoshop filters and their respective print results...!
Oh, this really looks good. I think I would fall immediately for screenprinting as well. Especially since you can use your own images...
Sorry to have missed the Sommerhausen experience!
Jacqueline
Posted by: Jacqueline | February 12, 2009 at 06:42 PM