Print, stick, write, seal; print, stick, write, seal; print, stick...

This year the little Japanese Gocco printer went to work on these single-sided greetings, printed in silver, powder blue and dark green and finished with a real Swarovski crystal on the bauble. I say 'the Gocco' got to work - the troops were in for their usual annual overtime, hunched over the printing machine and wondering about the next tea break.

The design is a simple silhouette of a little girl and her toy reindeer on wheels, reaching for the sparkly bauble hidden among the sharp nib icicles. It's evocative of a lot of the work I've done this year - silhouettes have featured heavily, with the work for the Robert Burns Museum (on the following blog) and the Harper Lee cover, to name but two, and since I'm a traditionalist who loves Christmas, it had to reflect the childlike wonder I still feel at the rustling of parcels and tree branches, and that feeling that 'something is different' on Christmas Eve.

Hand-printed on 700gsm GF Smith Colourplan, in white, with a rubber-stamped reverse, mostly stamped by Anne. John did most of the crystals, with startling accuracy.

They took hours and hours, covered all the desks, cost a lot to post, and used a silly amount of ink. But e-cards? It'll be a hot day in December before you see any of those emerging from the Mole HQ.

And with that rather rash statement, it's Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Inkymole!

Gocco Christmas

What enormous fun! The annual Inkymole seasonal greeting was produced this year on a recently-acquired Gocco PG-5, a tiny all-in-one Japanese printing machine.

It's a cross between rubber stamping and screenprinting, and my initial results are amusingly oafish - a big loud Christmas greeting rendered in chunky colours which started off neatly contained in their own spaces, but soon bled excitedly into one another making some of the cards outrageously 'spontaneous'. A hefty amount of ink is required, but this little creature can produce up to 1000 prints from one screen. Seeing them pile up over every available surface in the studio, with gaudy Christmas lights bouncing off them, was truly delightful.

I've been moaning ever so slightly over the last eighteen months or so that I don't do enough print, and so in a year where we seem to have received far fewer 'physical' cards, and more 'e-cards', I was proud to be lugging bagfuls of hand-printed, slightly wonky things to the post office. Actually...that sounds like last year. Come to think of it, the year before, too...and...

I think I finally appreciate now that if ever the year comes when I don't send something hand-made (or at least hand-drawn) out into the world in December, there will be uproar.

Thanks little lavender Gocco monster. Can't wait to see what I do with it in 2010!

Prepare, as I geek out most publicly. Here's how the printing was done:

The artwork has to be drawn in one take onto thin non-reflective paper, using a carbon-heavy tool - a pencil, the special RISO Gocco pen, or you can use a photocopy. After an initial disaster using the original art (bottom left) which revealed the Special Pen to be Not So Special, I went for an old-fashioned sticky-with-carbon photocopy.

Gocco lid open, ready for action:

You put the artwork down on the sticky pad, press the lid down and expose the screen using these amazingly glass-fruit-like bulbs, which pop like 70s flashbulbs and die after just one screen. Ahhhhh....

Then you cover the reverse of the screen with as much ink as it will take, blocking off areas you don't want to bleed with ink blocking foam. I only used a bit of this, as I wanted to see just how amusing the bleeding would be.

The screen looks like this after a while - completely smeared with ink:

Press down and clunk to print...

Print again...

Till you can't print any more...

And get your Mum to stamp and label them! (Note starring sprout being coy behind prints drying in cute Gocco rack.)

Gocco mentalism!

LINKS:

http://www.savegocco.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gocco