A few weeks ago one of Ray’s Big Brown Record Town clients, Josh and Brittany Nettles, asked me to create/print some album art for their cd. I did this using my Wacom Intuos (blogged here) and Print Gocco. I thought I would share a little bit of the printing process because, well, Goccos are kind of weird.
First off, a Gocco is a self-contained Japanese screen printer. Or something like that. It was originally marketed as a toy in the 70s and discontinued in 2008. According to Wikipedia, it’s estimated that 1/3 of all Japanese households own one. Whaaaaat?! It’s recently gained popularity with American crafters. My mom gave me mine for Christmas a few years ago and I believe she purchased it from ebay. 1. I created the images for the front and back of the cd sleeves using my Wacom tablet. I went with a look that felt handmade and used handwriting instead of font. When I finished creating the images I had them scaled down to fit on a cd sleeve and printed it on a xerox printer (an important step because you want carbon in the printed image).2. Next, I trimmed the image to fit the size of my gocoo, which is about 3.5 x 5. Different Gocco models come in different sizes, but they are generally small and have similar sized print surfaces. Mine is the perfect size for printing on cd sleeves.

3. The next step is where it gets kind of wild. The way the Gocco burns your image into the screen (meaning, allowing ink to pass through ONLY those areas on the screen that you want to create a print from) is through some crazy black magic process involving one-flash light bulbs and carbon (hence the xerox copy) melding together on the screen. 2 crazy light bulbs + gocco lamp hood + pressing down on the contraption = burnt screen!4. Then, I squirted (squirted?) some gocco-specific ink onto my newly burnt screen.5. I placed my black cd sleeve onto the gocco sticky pad, brought the screen down and printed. This part is similar to stamping an image on to paper.

I ended up with 100 of these bad boys!Gocco prints are usually NOT perfect. You will almost always have to touch up your image in spots, but it’s just the nature of the process.
Check out Josh and Brittany Nettles on their Facebook page and on itunes!