Or, I should say, my first successful gocco print.

It had taken me a while to decide to invest in a Gocco printer. Riso, the makers of the Japanese home screen printing kit stopped production in 2005. I eventually took the plunge and purchased PG-11 kit on Ebay from Japan.

My first attempt was frustratingly unsuccessful. To make your master screen Gocco requires you to use a print made from carbon ink. I tried to make my master screen from a photocopy which attached itself after exposure (even using the blue filter). After more internet research it seemed that people had less problems using a laser printer. Following their advice my second attempt was a success.

Advice and lessons learnt

I read quite a lot about people getting patchy prints and not using enough ink. I may have over inked a little and my first design required a lot of coverage. From this I learnt..

It may sound obvious but it can get messy, at least messier than instructional videos may lead you to believe. For the mess have to hand; turps, rags and newspaper.

Ink got past my screen and onto the printer body. I used a philips screwdriver to remove the see-through plastic plate to clean it, using cotton buds (q-tips) to get into the smaller spaces.

Have spare jars for excess ink. Old clean spice jars would be ideal.

The final product

For this first attempt I tried to keep things simple. One screen for the print, using two colours. I am looking forward to experimenting with a two screen print using the PG-11 registration plate.

After seeing my Micheal Lewis of MIKMIK Studios‘ Gocco prints I asked him where to purchase the card that he used (for his beautiful prints). The 250gsm Bier paper is manufactured using a combination of leftovers from the brewing industry: beer labels and malt/yeast/hops fibres. Available from the Green Stationery Company.

Prints are available in my new Maraid Etsy shop.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Design, Gocco, My work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.