Something Gocco Me Started

Xtina showing us two different-sized Gocco machines, as Kirsty looks on. Shot on an LC-A+ with Fuji T64 film.

Trust me to get hooked on another obsolete format — it’s not like I spend enough of my time scouring eBay for SACDs (Simply Red SACDs, obvs), 110 film and other dead-and-buried products that I won’t mention, for fear you’ll all outbid me. In fact, it’s my love of dying formats that resulted in me publishing this two weeks after my workshop. Oh, film!

Leona and other-Kat, with some of Xtina’s lovely works behind them.

While Gocco machines are fairly affordable to pick up, coming in at around £100 – £150 on eBay and Etsy, it’s the bulbs which have the most fragile future. Having been discontinued in 2008, limited supplies are being traded for higher-and-higher monies, and unless some bright entrepreneurs do an Impossible Project style-resurrection, there will come a day when Gocco machines become nothing but expensive paperweights.

Some of Xtina’s greeting cards, which she sells under the Printed Wonders moniker.

Having learnt all of this from cribbing up on the Japanese screenprinting technique in 2009 when considering ways to make wedding invitations, I jumped at the chance to attend Xtina Lamb’s workshop last week, after spying a posting on Flickr’s Gocco group.

Natalie watches (while Katie snoozes/practises arm lunges) as Xtina shows us some Gocco’d bunting.

Held at Clerkenwell Craft Central building a stone’s throw away from one of my favourite roads in London (and where I work several days a week), Exmouth Market, Xtina’s 2.5-hour workshop quickly turned into a 4-hour extravaganza, as we were all having far too much fun making prints of our hand-drawn illustrations to bother with, y’know, going home and eating dinner.

Some of my considered images — Spudgie-the-budgie; a Canon AV-1, and Effie.

Talking us through the history (and shaky future) of Gocco, and the two ways you can print using the machines, we set about creating our illustrations. The nine other girls were all dab hands at drawing, but given my best efforts look like a child’s worst nightmare, I chose to trace over a photo of Effie-cat using a lightbox.

Burning the pen-drawn or carbon-laden printed image onto the Gocco mesh, Katie laid her design down on the Gocco machine’s bed.

From there, you have to “burn” your image onto a screenprinting-like mesh frame, using the Gocco machine and two Riso bulbs. Luckily the fine mesh needed for the frames is still being produced, and bizarrely Australia and Germany seem to be the best places to purchase it.

With the image of Effie burnt onto the mesh, I then stretched it over a frame and gaffa taped it on.

Once your image has been transferred to the mesh frame, you can screenprint like you normally would, with a squeedgie, some ink and paper. It’s important your mesh is affixed tightly to the frame, as any lax waning of it could cause issues in the printing process.

Xtina adds some screenprinting ink to a squeedgie, before scraping it over the frame like you would an ordinary screenprint.

Some of my early efforts bled while I was still getting the hang of the technique, and how much ink to use, but I was quite pleased with my later results. I do wish I’d used a finer Sharpie pen to draw my image with though, as after looking at some of the other girls’ fine detail, I got a massive green-eye for their talent.

Et voila; an Effie-cat printed on an exercise book.

Speaking of which, as with all crafting workshops, one of the nicest elements of the evening was meeting so many like-minded souls, including Kirsty, Kat, Natalie, Leona and of course, finally meeting one of my favourite bloggers, What Katie Does.

It’s a botch job I did on winding the film on, but here you can see some of the other girls’ wonderful efforts.

Xtina is running more Gocco classes in the future, and considering the supplies; her generosity with the hours; her expertise and of course the cake she made for the course, the £35 cost makes it extremely good value-for-money. Go forth and book classes, oh ye lusters of near-extinct pastimes!