Stampalofi Blog
Adventures in Mimeograph
Since becoming obsessed with mimeography I have been finding ways to expand my knowledge and share said knowledge with others. It is really great, come check out what's happening.
1
How I am here now
After a strange year for everyone I see a few people with new hobbies and new skills and new family members as well as all the loss we have suffered from this year.
I managed to keep sane and busy by learning how to make bread and by researching heavily into alternative printmaking methods.
After graduating I had always wanted to keep printing but without a studio certain processes were out of the question. I had used a lot of screen printing in my degree and finding a way to screen print at home was always on my mind.
In 2019 we had brought together a really nice group of people who were willing to participate in whatever strange artistic project we devised for them and so I really wanted to get them trying new art methods. I also wanted a way to make props such as tickets or forms or other paraphernalia useful for the art games.
As the lock down hit I found myself with a bit of time to sit and go through a lot of printmaking resources online. I dived into an internet rabbit hole chasing a few products that were a mystery. One in particular was a middle aged guy on Youtube who had made these fairly obscure videos using a paper stencil with a plastic surface that he burned away with a tattoo thermal printer.
He didn't say what the paper was, only that he made them from a product he got from Europe. This sent me on a wild goose chase searching for European products but in the end I am pretty sure he was mistaken.
I went back to his other videos and he was a great aficionado of mimeography, gestetner mimeographs in particular. I then consumed everything I could find on these wonderful machines. I found a great gallery/workshop online in Japan that uses waxed paper to make stencils for hand mimeography but it seems that the only people who produced the paper were a small family run workshop in Japan and it cost an arm and a leg to gather all the things needed together to make a print. The process they used however was beautiful and I hope to make a connection with them at some point.
Deep down in the comments of a Facebook page was mention of risograph paper and in the comments of another obscure Youtube video of a mimeograph working was an explanation that the guy had used a fax machine somehow to burn the paper.
Fast forward a few weeks and I had 5 second hand thermal fax machines that I had bought for between 5 and 20 euros each. Stuck staring blankly after archaic menu settings and manuals for obsolete technology I had ordered some of the risograph
paper from Ebay for 40 euros and was eyeing an antique flatbed mimeograph.
Between this new obsession, teaching online and bread making my lockdown was not turning out to be so bad after all. I spent the money I saved from not drinking in pubs and eating out into this new passion and was happily collecting info on it.
After finally managing to find the right setting to reset the fax machine to ignore the fact that I had removed the toner ribbon, I managed to convince it to burn a stencil which to my absolute joy and relief worked incredibly well. In fact, looking back now I am really surprised it worked and if it hadn't I am not sure what my next step would have been. Really, I am not sure what exactly convinced me to go so far in that direction but with that success I printed with some slow drying red acrylic paint.
Super happy at the success I turned to the ink I was using and thought there must be something better and cheaper than this. Anther internet deep dive into natural inks and printing paste and I was ready to try printing with rice paste used in woodcut printmaking. Starting off by adding acrylic I had also found a recipe for printing with coffee online that I wanted to use which was great.
After getting to grips with the process I decided I would like to make how to videos to share what I had found. I made a simple video with terrible audio and super sped up filming in low light that managed to capture what I was doing. I sat back and thought I could do it better and with each video I learned how to use Adobe Premier better and got excited about making printmaking videos with this process but really the process was also developing.
The fax machine and me and the rest of the stuff went on holiday and it continued to work but I was sure there would be a way to reduce the size and make the whole thing more portable when I stumbled onto the Print Gocco.
I found this wonderful Japanese toy that seemingly produced a really quite large and thriving online community with forums on Yahoo and Flikr in the early 2000s but after the company stopped producing the toy and the consumables in 2008 the community faded. It fought hard to stay alive but the last real posts on the community forums were mostly in 2012 and the last gasps in 2014.
I had arrived to the party too late. The toy was a wonderfully neat version of the process I was using but instead of a fax machine it used some single use flash bulbs which were of course not recyclable and instead of the soft roller I was using to push the ink through the screen it used a sponge to put pressure over the whole print area at once kind of like a stamp.
I was very much taken with this and searched and searched and was super lucky as there was someone selling one in Italy and not only in Italy but in Milan where I was living. I contacted the person and asked to buy it and he turned out to be a guy my age who had bought it to make prints with his then girlfriend. Once they broke up the Gocco sat quietly in the corner until he decided to sell it.
He gave it to me for 100 euros which included a bunch of the consumables most importantly the ink and the screens. The ink was important as I wasn't sure that it would work with my homemade ink and the screens as I needed to use them as a template for my own.
When I got it home I tried it straight away with the original process and loved it. The next challenge was to try it with the risograph paper and the homemade ink.
It worked!
From then on I had a great model of what I wanted to build. This little printer was only suitable for printing postcard sized prints but other models existed and other people from the community had tweeked and modded theirs so here I am.
My wish it to make a much simpler form of this product with as many components as possible to be made from easily obtained materials. My hope is to re-ignite that art community, help spread information about cheap and easily made materials with an emphasis on low environmental impact and to create a product that I can be used and shared with others.
I managed to keep sane and busy by learning how to make bread and by researching heavily into alternative printmaking methods.
After graduating I had always wanted to keep printing but without a studio certain processes were out of the question. I had used a lot of screen printing in my degree and finding a way to screen print at home was always on my mind.
In 2019 we had brought together a really nice group of people who were willing to participate in whatever strange artistic project we devised for them and so I really wanted to get them trying new art methods. I also wanted a way to make props such as tickets or forms or other paraphernalia useful for the art games.
As the lock down hit I found myself with a bit of time to sit and go through a lot of printmaking resources online. I dived into an internet rabbit hole chasing a few products that were a mystery. One in particular was a middle aged guy on Youtube who had made these fairly obscure videos using a paper stencil with a plastic surface that he burned away with a tattoo thermal printer.
He didn't say what the paper was, only that he made them from a product he got from Europe. This sent me on a wild goose chase searching for European products but in the end I am pretty sure he was mistaken.
I went back to his other videos and he was a great aficionado of mimeography, gestetner mimeographs in particular. I then consumed everything I could find on these wonderful machines. I found a great gallery/workshop online in Japan that uses waxed paper to make stencils for hand mimeography but it seems that the only people who produced the paper were a small family run workshop in Japan and it cost an arm and a leg to gather all the things needed together to make a print. The process they used however was beautiful and I hope to make a connection with them at some point.
Deep down in the comments of a Facebook page was mention of risograph paper and in the comments of another obscure Youtube video of a mimeograph working was an explanation that the guy had used a fax machine somehow to burn the paper.
Fast forward a few weeks and I had 5 second hand thermal fax machines that I had bought for between 5 and 20 euros each. Stuck staring blankly after archaic menu settings and manuals for obsolete technology I had ordered some of the risograph
paper from Ebay for 40 euros and was eyeing an antique flatbed mimeograph.
Between this new obsession, teaching online and bread making my lockdown was not turning out to be so bad after all. I spent the money I saved from not drinking in pubs and eating out into this new passion and was happily collecting info on it.
After finally managing to find the right setting to reset the fax machine to ignore the fact that I had removed the toner ribbon, I managed to convince it to burn a stencil which to my absolute joy and relief worked incredibly well. In fact, looking back now I am really surprised it worked and if it hadn't I am not sure what my next step would have been. Really, I am not sure what exactly convinced me to go so far in that direction but with that success I printed with some slow drying red acrylic paint.
Super happy at the success I turned to the ink I was using and thought there must be something better and cheaper than this. Anther internet deep dive into natural inks and printing paste and I was ready to try printing with rice paste used in woodcut printmaking. Starting off by adding acrylic I had also found a recipe for printing with coffee online that I wanted to use which was great.
After getting to grips with the process I decided I would like to make how to videos to share what I had found. I made a simple video with terrible audio and super sped up filming in low light that managed to capture what I was doing. I sat back and thought I could do it better and with each video I learned how to use Adobe Premier better and got excited about making printmaking videos with this process but really the process was also developing.
The fax machine and me and the rest of the stuff went on holiday and it continued to work but I was sure there would be a way to reduce the size and make the whole thing more portable when I stumbled onto the Print Gocco.
I found this wonderful Japanese toy that seemingly produced a really quite large and thriving online community with forums on Yahoo and Flikr in the early 2000s but after the company stopped producing the toy and the consumables in 2008 the community faded. It fought hard to stay alive but the last real posts on the community forums were mostly in 2012 and the last gasps in 2014.
I had arrived to the party too late. The toy was a wonderfully neat version of the process I was using but instead of a fax machine it used some single use flash bulbs which were of course not recyclable and instead of the soft roller I was using to push the ink through the screen it used a sponge to put pressure over the whole print area at once kind of like a stamp.
I was very much taken with this and searched and searched and was super lucky as there was someone selling one in Italy and not only in Italy but in Milan where I was living. I contacted the person and asked to buy it and he turned out to be a guy my age who had bought it to make prints with his then girlfriend. Once they broke up the Gocco sat quietly in the corner until he decided to sell it.
He gave it to me for 100 euros which included a bunch of the consumables most importantly the ink and the screens. The ink was important as I wasn't sure that it would work with my homemade ink and the screens as I needed to use them as a template for my own.
When I got it home I tried it straight away with the original process and loved it. The next challenge was to try it with the risograph paper and the homemade ink.
It worked!
From then on I had a great model of what I wanted to build. This little printer was only suitable for printing postcard sized prints but other models existed and other people from the community had tweeked and modded theirs so here I am.
My wish it to make a much simpler form of this product with as many components as possible to be made from easily obtained materials. My hope is to re-ignite that art community, help spread information about cheap and easily made materials with an emphasis on low environmental impact and to create a product that I can be used and shared with others.
«The baseline for what seems "normal" in lighting is the direction and character of natural and artificial sources and the context provided by other clues»
Steve Jobs
Apple CEO
2
The Natural Light Baseline
To differentiate that role from that of "key" modeling when a modeling source moves behind the object it is typically called a "rim" or "accent" light. In portrait lighting it also called a "hair" light because it is used to create the appearance of physical separation between the subject's head and background.
When a photographer puts the sun behind an object its role in the lighting strategy changes from modeling the front of the object to one of defining its outline and creating the impression of physical separation and 3D space a frontally illuminated scene lacks.
Steve Jobs
Apple CEO
1818 Magazine by Stephanie Toole
To differentiate that role from that of "key" modeling when a modeling source moves behind the object it is typically called a "rim" or "accent" light. In portrait lighting it also called a "hair" light because it is used to create the appearance of physical separation between the subject's head and background.
3
Creating Natural Looking Artificial Lighting
A typical studio lighting configuration will consist of a fill source to control shadow tone, a single frontal key light to create the highlight modeling clues on the front of object facing the camera over the shadows the fill illuminates, one or more rim/accent lights to create separation between foreground and background, and one or more background lights to control the tone of the background and separation between it and the foreground.
There are two significant differences between natural lighting and artificial sources. One is the character of the fill and the other is more rapid fall-off in intensity. In nature skylight fill is omni-directional and usually brighter from above. That "wrap around" characteristic is difficult to duplicate with a directional artificial source.
