Ugh-My-Gocco

After the excitement of printing successfully my first awesome round of prints, I have been totally stoked about the Gocco. Yes, it's true, I only posted about the Gocco printing process just this morning. But if you must know, I've had those pictures taken for at least a day. So again, after round one being so terribly successful, I immediately began planning for my next round of printing, hoping to make something even awesomer than before. (Yeah, I know "awesomer" isn't a word, but I'm thinking you get the idea of what I'm trying to say!)

I planned and worked all day, on getting the image squared away, on sizing and darkening the image just right, on xeroxing and planning ink colors, etc. I even got M on the venture and he was pretty excited to be involved, too, considering that he had seen what could come out of the machine on the first turn of it.

This evening I got down to pulling out the Gocco again, setting the whole thing up once more, organizing myself even better than the first time. I had a place for my cards, my drying racks, my inks. I had it all ready to go. I let M screw in the bulbs and push down the folding arm for the bulbs to flash and burn the screen. And when we removed the lamp and looked at the screen in anticipation, we found that only one bulb had gone off.

After trying a few more times, we realized that one of the bulbs was indeed faulty, and could not be used. The screen was only partially burnt, and the image was no longer aligned. Given that you get 10 bulbs in a kit and it takes 2 bulbs per go, having to throw away an unused (but bad) bulb gave me the shivers. So I decided that in efforts to not waste a screen, too, I'd just put in an extra bulb, replacing the bad one and re-burning the screen. M did the honors again after the new bulb was in place, and the bulbs flashed in glory, giving me back my hopes.

M felt as though he had saved the day, and I was thrilled to have saved the screen with the loss of only one bad bulb. However...

When we lifted the lamp and inspected the screen, it wasn't burnt very well, and from what we could tell, it looked like the middle of the image wasn't burnt at all.

Still, with my hope tucked away in my heart strings, I ink-blocked the darn thing anyway, squirted my Gocco inks on with a vengeance, and set up to print.

And after one print, then 2, then 3, we knew it was hopeless and had not burnt properly. 3 bulbs and one screen gone, I felt so terribly defeated, and still do as I type these words.

That being said, I had to stop myself from diving head first into a giant bowl fruit loops to cure the pain. Instead, I decided I needed to write about it. I said to M just minutes ago, "Part of trying new stuff is that it isn't always going to be perfect, right?" He said, "right!" And I continued, "I have to tell people that in my blog. This is part of the journey, screwing up a little bit." Or a lot. Whatever.

So keeping my composure and avoiding the kitchen, I put all the elements of my Gocco kit away neatly in its box. I tidied up the table and gave M a smooch and Mo, like most cats, picked up on my sadness and followed me into the bedroom to "fix" it with his magic feline abilities. And that is where I sit now, a cat by my arm, writing about this whole ordeal.

I feel better already. I'm still bummed out, sure. But I'm not giving up. Instead, I'm going to take a breather, finish this post, and draw in my sketchbook. "Back to the foundation" of where it all comes from, anyhow.

That's the greatest thing about a pencil and an eraser and smooth, white sketchbook paper-- it will not bring me technical difficulties. Not tonight.