Oh, Gocco! Save-the-date!

This weekend I had some fun with my Gocco! The white ink with extra bulbs and screens arrived on Friday from Judy at Northwood Studios, so I went to work printing my save-the-date cards. I purchased the PG-11 version instead of the PG-5 because of the registration capabilities, as well as, the extension package with the basic inks and a How To Gocco DVD and CD, and I think it was well worth the extra dough. The CD doesn't work (which I need to email Judy about), but the DVD was hilarious! It was straight out of the 80s and had obviously been an old recorded from a VHS tape, but it had some great advanced gocco techniques. Also, included in the extension package was a written guide, which proved extraordinarily helpful! Here is my Save-the-Date design. I got the birds and branch image from istock via Miss Penguin’s suggestion from Weddingbee. This is the card design, but for the envelopes I just used the birds and branch as well as our address. As a designer, I felt like I was cheating. I could have come up with the illustration in Illustrator but am a) too busy and b) just plain lazy! Besides, it was so easy to download and import into Illustrator – it look 5 minutes to download and import rather than the 8+ hours to draw myself. I love the fonts! I used Futura Medium (block font) and Laurell (cursive font), which I acquired years ago when I worked as a graphic designer.
I double checked everything a million times before I flashed the screen because I knew I only had one shot to get it right! After all, this is my first ever Gocco project. Side Note: Always remember to use the blue filter to avoid excess carbon from imprinting onto the screen. I printed the birds on the front and the address on the back while using one screen in order to conserve the single use screens and bulbs. I wish I would have put the address vertical instead of horizontal because it made for some interesting registering later.
Again, I used the wisdom and advice from Miss Penguin of Weddingbee on Gocco Printing about registering. Above is a photo of me printing the back of the envelopes. Because I had printed the front first, I covered the screen with regular paper to avoid the ink printing on the back.

This is me counting to 10 to get the right amount of pressure/ink on the print.
This is Chris and Lylia helping me ;)
Here is the front of the envelope

Here are the envelopes laying out on my kitchen countertop.

I loved how the envelopes turned out, but was very disappointed in the cards. I used a turquoise ink for the birds and branch on this beautiful chocolate brown paper by ArtCo. that I got at Xpedex Paper here in Denver. When I printed it the ink looked fine, but when it dried the ink turned silver. I think it must have been a reaction to the chemicals in the paper because when I printed the same ink on white paper the turquoise was fine. I seriously considered redoing the save-the-date cards – I discovered the problem after printing about 25 – but I didn’t want to waste screen, bulbs, and paper. I guess it was a great learning experience, but now I have to rethink my invitations because I wanted to use the same ink and paper for invites!

Inking the final screen...

The printed Save-the-Date cards.

Final product. Overall, it was really fun, even though I am disappointed with the colors of the cards. I am sending them out in the mail today and they should arrive on your doorstep any day. Enjoy!