Going Gaga for Gocco

Good morning to you all out there and overseas. Its been an interesting foray into Gaga and Gocco today.. starting with Lady G and ending with some japanese screen printing.


I've been admiring Lady Gaga from a distance for sometime now. Maybe it's my diehard ear for a hit (memories of working at EMI in the '80's where ruffles and platforms weren't mixed in the same sentence), and knowing a hit from the first few bars,or is it just that she sings them like the anthems of the 80's. Whichever way I look at it, she nails a hit every time and markets it perfectly too. 


I must admit, I do like the wearable installation art which is her mnemonic (thing). What started out as an indie sounding artist has become a worldwide snowballing phenomenon. So it comes as no surprise to discover that her fan page rates the 4th most liked page on Facebook with over 31,280,000 fans.


Moving on today I got out my new Gocco printer, a mini screen printing device which I recently bought on ebay. I hadn't expected it to work first time as I haven't done it before, just googled several videos to see techniques. 


My main concern was that I would attempt a print containing too many fine lines that an almost antique Gocco unit may not be able to reproduce in a sharp enough quality.


Admittedly I have lowered my expectation of a good result in anticipation of what may happen. I wanted to print the blueprint of a ship that I've pictured in the previous post, but thought better of it and started out with my own swing tags. 


I'm using black thick card and a white gocco ink. Making sure I have all the correct sized cards cut and ready to go.

I used the master screen which had been left out of the bag, probably for sometime and I didn't know if it would still be good to go. 

The flash went off over the master screen and the photocopy from which the screen is created with the help of heat derived from the intense bright flash of two flash bulbs in the overhead lamp unit. Here's the photocopy and the screen side by side.

I've placed the master back in its position as I've designed this piece to be 2 prints. The top half of the screen is to print the front of the cards and the bottom of the master will be used to print the back of the cards. So I ink them up separately.

For this to be clean and effective I've placed a paper on the mount and marked with crop marks where to position the card for the first run. 

Each card is positioned where the black card sits. I only ink up the upper part of the master and then run all the cards through, one at a time.

Here's my first one hot off the press. I left them to dry for 10 to 15 minutes, scraped off any residue ink and then inked up the lower section of the master. I repositioned the cards one by one and printed them from the lower area of the print mount.

 

Here are all the cards, I could have kept going. The quality didn't fade, though you do need to re-ink when you see it's necessary.

All in all I'm happy with the result; clear white lines could be printed from the little gem of a machine even type at 8pt. Its a great contraption and prints like a little ripper. You can do multi colouring in one run if you section off your print master with bluetack so the ink doesn't spread. 

Signing off for tonight see you soon.