a love Larger than the Sky

I hope everybody had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! Over here we have been pretty busy these last few days, with an impromptu trip to the Oregon coast on one of my lucky days off. Before that, though, I was winding down my week days (I work mostly on the weekends) and finally finished the second round of Larger than the Sky.

This two color Gocco print has been one of the cornerstones of my shop; it serves as my logo on Facebook, for example, and was my banner on SilkFair when I had a shop there. Since the move last year I've been sold out, so I was pretty anxious to get these kids back into the shop.

This time around the printing turned out to be a chain of lessons in Gocco troubleshooting. First, while putting down the initial layer of blue ink, I realized I didn't have enough. The blue of last year's prints was always too light to capture well in photographs, so I considered this a fine motivation. But, I had to mix my next color directly on the screen, and that was a challenge. I'm really happy with the deep, brilliant blue I achieved, though.

The second step, weeks later, was much harder. I honestly don't remember how I printed this last year. The two parts of the image are in opposite orientations on the screen, making it hard to "stamp" the second layer over the first. It came back to me right away that this was one of my earlier Gocco experiments, and really not such a great idea in execution. There was no way I was about to let the 30+ sheets of watercolor paper go to waste, now that they'd been printed with the sky blue, however, so I waited for a day when I was feeling peaceful and up for the challenge. I hit a good pace, squeegeing away a late afternoon.

It took several hours, and quite a few mistakes, but I've listed the first of the new round in the shop today. There were far fewer successes on watercolor paper than I'd like, I think the screen will be retired simply out of difficulty. I'll be listing a round of "seconds" (that actually came out really well) that were my tests printed on Arturo paper in a few days. For now, the very very limited run of new prints is up, new photos and all!