Prickly Pear Bloom

This is a story of my personal inability to reason. Grab onto something.

My gocco printer has been sitting in the closet for nigh on 4 months now, waiting patiently for me to put it to work. I have been loving it from across the room all this time, dreaming and making plans for its employment, sending flirtatious glances its way, but I have been procrastinating. Yes! Procrastinating on actually printing something with it. Why?

I think part of the reason was that I didn’t want to screw up. Or waste paper. I wanted that first project to be perfect, and wonderful, and beautiful, and I was afraid that if it sucked I would have wasted a screen and 2 bulbs and however many pieces of paper I printed. I also had grand plans. I wanted to do something with multiple screens, 2 or 3 color overprints, and everything I had ideas for seemed inadequate.

Finally, I made the commitment to print our moving announcement/change of address cards with her. I designed and designed, getting the double sided card laid out just the way I wanted. I chose and cut a favorite paper that I had lots of extra laying around. Then this weekend, I set the gocco printing in motion. I set everything up, ready to go, and after pumping myself up a little bit with a nervous knot in my stomach, irrationally afraid that I might start the house on fire, pressed the machine down to expose the screen.

And nothing happened.

No flash of light, no crackling bulbs, no exposed screen.

I checked to make sure the screen and image were aligned correctly, that the bulbs and housing were positioned. I went online looking for help, and verified that the safety switch was indeed set off. I even emailed Leslie to seek her advice. I was baffled.

Four hours later, I was still completely confused, when I removed a little panel to discover the place where the BATTERIES go. Batteries, people. It’s amazing that anyone trusts me with anything.

I have no idea why it never occurred to me that the thing would require some sort of voltage to do its job, but it didn’t. Maybe I thought it all worked through some mysterious Japanese magic, or perhaps there were fairies that came to flash the bulbs. It seems so obvious now. Of course, after I sheepishly placed the batteries in the gocco, it worked exactly as it should.

But, now I finally understand how darn fun this little printer is! It’s so low tech, and it shows, in the uneven and unpredictable ink distribution, but I love that. I learned that the printable area is smaller than I had thought it would be, as the bulbs didn’t expose the entire image as I designed it, so on the far long sides and corners of the cards the image didn’t print exactly as I intended. But I don’t mind. If I had wanted it to be perfect, I would have printed it from the computer. I love the handmade-ness, and the unexpected accidents that occur with any type of hand printing. I love how each print is slightly different from the others.

After printing both sides, I still felt like it needed something, so I tried my hand at an overprint of a second color, filling in the “HARK” in red, to give it a little more of a Christmassy feel {since we are moving just in time for Christmas}. No pictures at the moment due to the darn winter darkness. I didn’t register the first run very well, so the red field didn’t register exactly with the outline of the work on each card, but again, I sort of like that unpredictability. I often try to experiment with this off-register effect in other digital design, so it’s fun when it happens naturally.

I did a few on-purpose misprints also, printing both the front and back images on the same area, to see what would happen, and I think I might frame one of them and hang it with the other art and photography in the new house. I would show you the whole piece, but it has our address on it, and I don’t feel the need to share that with the whole internets. But you get the jist.

The Husband was facinated by this whole process, his favorite part is blowing the bulbs to expose the screen. I have to pack it all up now to move, but I cannot wait to have another go at printing something new!