4 tonne tango!

We had our big moving day from Woolloomooloo to Glebe on Tuesday! The following photos give a pretty good idea of what that entailed.

And a quick montage I made of the day:

It'll probably be a month or so until we're settled into our new home. There's some brilliant old stories about the Glebe viaducts. It's lucky I don't believe in ghosts!

*All photos and footage are mine.

PRINTING!!! (and web stuff)

So I finally finished designing my Street Art - I'm proud to say it's almost all my own work, I just got a little bit of feedback help with things like fonts and layout.

I got my plates made up the other day at Imagination Graphics. I'm glad I checked everything as (LITERALLY) the last second because my QR codes didn't work!!! Thankfully I was able to fix them in time.

I spent the last two days printing, and got everything done. And let me tell you, 2 colour plates x 160 sheets on our press in 2 days, not to mention chopping them all in half and signing the limited edition of 12 - is not an easy feat!!!

Here's a bit of a documentation of the process:

Choosing my ink colour for the fountain (and making sure the middle mixes to a nice purple):

Putting the ink on the inking rollers:

Getting the plate all ready and properly dampened:

First print, colour no.1:

Day Two: Black Ink

Plate no. 2: Black plate

Sorting out some "too much water" issues:

Drying on print racks:

Sorting out some registration issues:

Chopping!

And some videos to explain the whole process (excuse the dodgy "self-camera" work)

*Images & videos all mine.

And that's the printing.

Website work has been a whole new world for me. I've never built a wordpress before and suddenly I've had to look up things like CSS codes. I think it's looking pretty good though! Don't you?

Thanks to Lucas Ihlein for all the help.

Trampoline Printing on the Big Fag Press

I'm writing this post without the intention to post it until after the Trampoline event on the 15th April 2012.

So basically I was approached through Lucas and the Big Fag Press by the people who run Trampoline, about designing and printing a flier for the event on the Press. Trampoline is a free art-like event where anyone can come along and give a 15 minutes speech about anything they think is "amazing".

For something roughly the size of an A5 piece of paper, this job would usually be sent to the Rizzeria or Blood and Thunder, but I agreed to take on the job to see a design through from concept to print as a practise for what I'll do for my major work.

I was given a basic outline and things I needed to include, so I came up with a design in three different shapes.

My "trapezoid" shape seemed to be the most resolved, so after a lot of back-and-forthing of emails, fonts and logos, and whether to include an exclamation mark, and how to spell "harbour" and many other things, my final design of the front ended up looking like this:

I then created the map on the back which wasn't easy, perhaps my orienteering skills need a bit of work, but google maps is a very useful tool! I basically ended up tracing over screen prints of google maps and shifting it around to fit my design.

The next step in the Big Fag Press print process is to layout the design on a metal plate. This is done at Imagination Graphics, a place in Marrickville. The designs need to be converted to greyscale, as the ink in the end is what puts the colour on the paper. Ie, 100% black = 100% blue, 50% black (grey), = 50% blue (light blue).

I decided to put in some more time and save money by making one plate only and putting both the back and front of my design on the plate and turning the paper over to print on the back. This meant registration had to be worked out exactly, which I tried to do myself by mirroring the paper placement, designs and crop marks etc, all from one central line. As you can see the template gets very complex.

In the end, I didn't trust my layout enough, because although the "snap to" functions and guidelines in illustrator are awesome, Imagination Graphics just has mathematical software which can lay something this complex out easily. For simpler jobs, it wouldn't be difficult to do this myself, it's usually just a matter of making sure two plates for two different colours match up exactly with relevant registration marks.

This was my plate in the end: (the design looks blue just because where the design is etched out is always blue no matter what colour you want to print with)

I looked through a few different colours (oil based inks), and chose a warm-ish Cyan.

I then chose my paper, which was 690 x 750, 300gsm, coated, and printed several copies onto scrap paper just to test out where the central line would fall on the paper bed on our machine. It was then a matter of printing onto both sides of the paper and shifting the registration lines a couple of millimetres to make sure back and front would match. In the below image is Pat helping me use the sun to see if our registration was working properly.

I then printed all 50 copies, let them dry, and then printed the backs, all the time fighting to keep a balance of water vs. ink on the plate as it was a very humid day and the plate was drying up quickly.

 At one point I had to clean the press blanket and start again because some flecks of paper began getting stuck to the blanket, and obscuring part of my design. This is the blanket below, it works as kind of a huge "stamp" taking ink from the plate to the paper.

And then became a tedious process of trimming the fliers, but they ended up coming out pretty well (at least I think so).

Pat, Diego and I are attending the Trampoline event on Sunday to give talk about the Big Fag Press - it works out nicely actually, because we do think it's pretty amazing!

*All images are mine.

Printing on the Rizz' and other Printing Collectives

Last year in May, the Rizzeria (which is a fellow printing collective of the Big Fag) set up residence at the Paper Mill at Angel Place in the city. The Rizz' is smaller than the Big Fag, and it's a Stencil press, not an offset press. It has its own unique quality and works in a similar way with colour separating.

 

[Rizzeria flyer for its Open Printing Studio]

 

Lucas paid for me to do a small workshop on the Rizz' on making "zines", so I colour separated and put together a few old photographs and digital work for a makeshift 'zine.

This is what I mean by colour separation:

The right image printed in black and the left image printed in red ended up like this (I like how the minor mis-registration of the hat creates an interesting 3D effect):

I printed on two different kinds of paper, and used a 'zine making template the volunteers at the Rizz' gave me. It was a fairly standard and easy to use template, but there are many templates out there, you just have to find them or even create your own, I've seen interesting ones that even fold out into a spiral.

 My 'zine was printed like this on both sides (so it can flip inside out) using teal, black and red. It ended up looking like this:

Another printing collective called Blood and Thunder exists, use a machine similar to the Rizzeria, except I believe it can print two colours at the same time. Mickie Quick works both at Blood and Thunder and The Big Fag Press.

Here are some images of the Blood and Thunder press (as you can see compared to the Big Fag, it's tiny!!):

*Blood & Thunder images taken from theblackmail.com.au.

We printed our Green Bans Art Walk flyer on Blood and Thunder:

Craig Kernow who works at Blood and Thunder (I haven't met him I've just seen a lot of these examples), has a signature technique where he colour separates a black and white image into approximately 50% another colour and tweaks around with the overlay in Photoshop. It produces a beautiful effect:

 *Image scanned from Performance Space's Publication POINT #3 April/ May 2011.

 I tried to replicate the effect on the Rizz' here but I don't think I've quite got the technique down. If I ever meet Kernow, I'll be sure to ask him, but a magician may not reveal his secrets!

*All images are my scanned artworks or artworks in progress unless expressely mentioned.