As an illustration-leaning artist (and a notorious WIP-hoarder), my medium has always ranged from using Procreate on a slowly-dying iPad to create smooth, clean lineart, to fanart scribbles in lined school workbooks when I was supposed to be focusing on long division or French verb conjugation. I realised that tattooing, and the design of tattoos, lends itself quite well to someone who doesn’t ‘finish’ a lot of work; I focus a lot on the centrepiece (the design itself) and neglect backgrounds and accents, or finishing touches to pull a full piece together, but this doesn’t affect my tattooing too much as most people who are after tattoos in my style typically don’t want a full ‘acrylic on canvas-’adjacent piece and instead opt for small, singular patchwork pieces. I’ve wanted to make physical prints of my art for a long time, but struggled to design things that felt like a cohesive work, something that would be on a wall instead of as part of an amalgamation of doodles and quotes on a leg.
I eventually realised (which took far too long) that I could blend lots of my themed flash sheets into full pieces themselves. For example, a flash sheet of breakfast foods - a croissant, coffee cup, teabag, bacon, sausages, etc. - eventually grew into a full ‘breakfast time’ print that I could envision (hopefully!) being framed in a cute quirky kitchen, as well as a long-sleeved shirt design with each breakfast component lined down the sleeves. Creating mockups was the easy part; adapting each digital canvas on Procreate to work with a commercial printer was more difficult for someone who has limited experience with moving digital art to a physical copy outside of putting it on skin.
At some point during this process, perhaps whilst posting to a small Instagram account to an audience of 3 ‘likers’, I took on the understanding that I needed to be creating these pieces for myself in the first instance, that I could not expect to immediately profit from my work and that others choosing to buy a print would simply be a bonus point of my creative practice. Art is a luxury; in the current climate, buying decorative prints from independent artists is not often at the top of people’s financial priorities, and whilst I love supporting my artist friends and buying their work I am also guilty of admiring their art from afar and never setting aside the cash to support them financially. But I enjoy having physical proof of my work - full sketchbooks, analogue photos, fake skins full of tattoo practice - and so creating my own prints simply to document my own progress didn’t seem like that bad of an idea, and would help me to understand how I could make them into something that I would be happy to sell later on.
Most of my art has been angled towards creating for other people: making custom designs for tattoos, or at least flash sheets full of pieces I know would be palatable to a wider audience, like ones themed around a popular TV show or relevant meme, or botching together ‘passable’ collage pieces in a 30-slide portfolio for university coursework. I rarely draw for the sake of drawing, and whenever I do there is at least a small part of me that is wondering how I can make it commercially viable, whether the marker colours used would lend themselves to CMYK print copies, which room of a kitschy yuppie apartment the finished piece could be displayed in, whether it’s eye-catching enough for guerrilla marketing stickers on lampposts or to sell for people to stick on their laptop covers. Of the few pieces I do eventually end up finishing, I prioritise those that could be turned into physical pieces and sell online or from a stall at an art market, and in turn neglect the drawn-out, painstaking yet rewarding lengthy processes that drew me to physical media in the first place in favour of quicker production methods that could yield a higher number of pieces to sell on.
I’ve always preferred physical media to digital versions - print magazines, analogue photos, vinyl and CDs, buying a boxed game on a disc instead of through an online store - and wrote a piece on ‘the physicality of memories’ on a blog I attempted to keep up with a few months ago, which sums it up pretty well in the context of my journalling:
Train tickets as backgrounds, itemised lines on receipts underlining my sentences, a sticker given to me by the assistant at the Vans store pasted in to remind me what I did that day. I enjoyed keeping a record of things that I did, even if nobody would see them but me; it gave me a sense of satisfaction that tapped into my creative urges, urges that are usually only fed by creating something from nothing. By taking an art-based subject at university, I’d managed to kill off the motivation to produce anything outside of my coursework, and subsequently gave up on my analogue photography and illustration that had occupied most of my evenings as a teenager. By scrapbooking, using pre-existing bits of nothing that bore some relevance to my day, I was finally able to create something remotely artistic in a way that didn’t require the initial inspiration + motivation combination that art school had beaten out of me.
I wrote letters to friends in other cities, other countries, even, and sent them small tokens of my life, for them to stick into their own journals so that I could still be effortlessly woven into their days despite our conversations being solely based on iMessage games and Twitter DMs. The virtual memories - screenshots, or stupid pictures that became memetic in our talks - however sentimental, however beautiful, felt like they could all slip away from me in an instant, hours of outpourings of adoration fizzling into cyberspace as if the words held no weight. I love physical contact, hugs, shared experiences - and it’s difficult to have that when you see each other once a year. Whereas taking a photo on a disposable camera during that annual meet and posting it to your best friend in a hand-decorated frame two weeks later? That feels real; the friendship is tangible, I am holding parts of our love in my two hands.
When looking for alternative homemade printing methods for creating art prints and screenprinted t-shirts, I stumbled across the concept of mimeographs and mimeoprinting, explained in fine, easy to digest detail by Rachel Simone Weil’s blog ‘NO BAD MEMORIES’ - the two particular posts I referred to were ‘Printmaking as play’ and ‘Mimeoprinting (Printmaking as play, pt.2)’. Weil does a fantastic job of breaking down each particular part of her process, including the initial inspirations behind the desire to print on a personal level rather than commercial. There’s something more charming about a slightly imperfect print, knowing that it was hand-crafted instead of mass-produced, that the artist behind it took the time to think about each individual layer and qualities of the paint and the methods of getting their art onto paper (which would also be carefully curated and selected) - and personally when I buy prints from independent small artists, I don’t expect them to have the same quality of something made from a large batch. I love small marks and paint bleeds, slightly faded or patchy ink coverage, anything that makes it more individual; a little bit when old ‘factory defect’ toys or vinyls rise in value due to them being the only ones of a batch to have a certain quality to them - think TY’s Beanie Baby range and error variants that made them more desirable to some collectors, even if only a small percentage who wanted to be one of the exclusive few to own a Beanie Baby with a slight mistyping error on the tag.
Mimeographs in this context refers to the replication of a printing process that somewhat died a death with the Print Gocco toy, produced by the Riso Gakku Corporation in the 1970s. Initially developed for the practice of nengajo- (sending New Year’s postcards to friends and family), it provided a quick, simple, and fun way for children and adults alike to make multiple copies of the same card via a thermoplastic stencil and ink pressed through mesh to create a print onto the material of their choice. It was essentially an accessible version of screenprinting, except with its focus on being more for recreational use than professional use and encouraging the idea of imperfections with each print for a personal touch.
The creator of the Print Gocco, Noboru Hayama, said that ‘make-believe play is a source of intellectual education’, leading to him using a derivative of the word gokko in the name: the Japanese phrase for ‘pretend play’. The mimicry of something that they want to learn about, that they see or something that interests them, is something that every child does when playing with dolls or animal toys or action figures or trains, and is considered an important part of childhood development. It presents a safe space for children to express not only desire or enjoyment of particular activities, but also fears and apprehension, and contributes to problem-solving skills later on in life when they encounter previously un-thought-of situations during their play that they are unsure how to solve¹.
Children creating problems as part of their play and using their imagination and toys at hand to learn to solve them, and learning to make art prints at home, using only readily available tools instead of spending money on singular-use items, are very similar thought processes in nature. Problem-solving and thinking of creative solutions is something I consider a key part of my practice - the experimentation is often part of the fun! I also wanted to approach my mimeoprint-making with a sustainable frame of mind; I already have many, many art materials that I’ve used for one-off projects, including coloured tattoo ink when the majority of my designs are black linework, and a £4 screenprinting kit from an early 2000’s brand (now discontinued) bought from a charity shop that I intended to use for t-shirt designs before realising no mesh screens were included and I would essentially need to do most of the legwork for this myself. The Print Gocco and its related components were discontinued in 2012 with the rise of the digital age, meaning that obtaining a Print Gocco system itself would not only be difficult and potentially expensive, but unsustainable, as the flash bulbs used to create the stencil are singular-use (meaning that they literally explode to generate the heat used to burn the image onto thermoplastic). Even if I could get my hands on a Print Gocco kit, I would be very limited to the number of designs that I could create with it, given that the bulbs are no longer manufactured, and this meant that I couldn’t experiment with multiple methods in the same way that I would with readily-available supplies. I think I’d still like to try one out - a knowledge of Japanese language and Asian auction websites may finally come in handy - but just for fun, which is arguably still part of this whole process.
Going back to Weil’s blog, NO BAD MEMORIES, she mentions the components used for thermoplastic image creating, and breaks down the idea that essentially, the Print Gocco created stencils via heat inscription, the same way that receipt printers use thermal imaging. As a tattoo practitioner - I daren’t call myself a tattoo artist just yet - I own an A4 thermal printer for creating tattoo stencils ‘printed’ with carbon paper, and with the limited amount of tattoos I currently manage to do, it doesn’t see much use outside of 8-hour fake skin design practice binges. Weil herself bought a small, inexpensive label printer for the sake of her mimeograph experiments, and combined thermoplastic paper in the form of risograph master (used for stencils in an actual risograph printing machine) with the label printer to create the stencils used for her prints. Albeit flimsy, the stencils made using the risograph master were reusable, easy to create from digital designs, and with each roll of the risograph master spanning a huge 100m in length, meant that it felt okay to make mistakes with; there’s plenty of room for error, which is exactly what I wanted. I could print at the wrong size, mess up on the colour layers, accidentally tear the stencil in trying to fit it to the screenprinting frame, and it wouldn’t really matter at the measly cost of 20p per metre of master.
[more coming soon!]