Following up from last week’s Classy Comic Recreations, here are some of the other entries in the Classy Photo Contest!

The task at hand was to “take a classy photo featuring yourself (or other humans or animals) along with any item(s) from the Wondermark Goodsery. Define ‘classy’ however you want — it doesn’t necessarily have to mean ‘wearing a top hat’ although that is probably fine.” Judging is based on:

20% Classiness
30% Quality of photography
50% Creativity
+10% Extra credit for description

So here we go! Thanks to all who submitted. Selected favorites ahoy:

Classy Reading

My brother reading Beards of Our Forefathers by an old cannon in a South Dakota city park, of all places. It was tricky to photograph him because he wanted to look at a specific page (I can’t remember which, though) and he kept moving his nose so his and the book’s wouldn’t line up well.

And yes, that is a top hat.

This appears to be the same brother as in the dinosaur picture from the last post! The tried-and-true “use the book as a beard mask” is a strong move. SCORES:

Classiness: Child, in top hat, near cannon. Yes. 13/20
Quality of photography: Crisp, colorful. Would have liked to see more cannon maybe? 15/30
Creativity: The beard-face has been done before, but this gains some creative points from using what appears to be a library book. 20/50
Description: Straightforward but nothing fancy. +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 53/100

RulesMicon

We use The CSBCM Rules to build our Infernal Devices.

This nicely framed copy of the Tinkerer’s Rules appears to be adorning something large and terrifying! Those are my two favorite adjectives, so well done. SCORES:

Classiness: Goggles are a plus. 12/20
Quality of photography: I would like to see more of the large and terrifying thing! 10/30
Creativity: This is a fairly straightforward snapshot, but I appreciate seeing the poster in the wild regardless. 12/50
Description: What is this terrifying thing? Tell me more about everything in this picture! +2/10

TOTAL SCORE: 36/100

In Which Security Camera Footage from the Art Gallery Comes Into Play

“Goodness, no!” said Foppish Bear, “That isn’t me perpetrating the most classy of crimes, the Art Heist. What, do all foppish bears look the same to you? That, my good man, is quite Racist.”

Nicely done! And quite a handsome wall of Wondermark comic prints you have there as well. SCORES:

Classiness: Art gallery theft is inherently classy. 12/20
Quality of photography: Grainy but clearly on purpose. It’s obvious what’s going on, and that’s what’s important. 18/30
Creativity: I am definitely on the watch for thieving bears after seeing this picture. 35/50
Description: Totally fine. +8/10

TOTAL SCORE: 73/100

A Traveling Wondermark Dispensary

Get you Wondermarks here! Cheapest Wondermarks on the eastern seaboard!

Alex here appears to have one of pretty much everything I’ve ever made. I like this Alex fellow. If you see him try to sell you something out of his trunk, at least flip through the books a little. They might not be too bad. SCORES:

Classiness: A serape is always a nice touch. 12/20
Quality of photography: Clear and bright. 15/30
Creativity: I am having fun imagining the trials and tribulations of a bootleg Wondermark vendor. 30/50
Description: Says what it does, does what it says. +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 62/100

From a Perpendicular Universe

Our subject from a nearby perpendicular universe is caught at his leisure.

Another entry from Alex, featuring my book Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death! I do not know if this strange sideways-world is one native to himself or one that he has entered strictly for the sake of the photograph, but either way I appreciate the view of it. SCORES:

Classiness: Sitting on steps is somewhat classy, I suppose? 8/20
Quality of photography: Colorful and interestingly angled. 18/30
Creativity: I will assign this value capriciously. 20/50
Description: Straightforward. +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 50/100

Foppish Bear and Piranhamoose™ Brand Slab’o'Meat Product

Foppish Bear only eats the finest meats: Piranhamoose™ Brand Slab’o'Meat Product, made from the finest elk, caribou and small game, with just a hint of man-flesh. Piranhamoose Slab’o'Meat Product — Sometimes you just want a slab of meat.

One of several entries featuring the Foppish Bear and a complete Piranhamoose™ line of questionable nutriments, this one struck my fancy for featuring what appears to be an entirely genuine mound of raw meat. SCORES:

Classiness: Meat is classy. Moustaches are classy. Knives — need I say more? 17/20
Quality of photography: A bit flash-heavy and flat. 6/30
Creativity: This couple appears to have spent an entire evening taking pictures in a moustache and a bear suit, and I have to respect that level of commitment. 40/50
Description: Just what we need. +10/10

TOTAL SCORE: 73/100

In which Señor Gamberro wrestles with literacy

Not wanting to be perceived as lacking the wit befitting a gentleman of his standing, the good luchador had taken to engaging in various forms of popular humorous scholarship.

This photo from Paolo fulfills a lifelong dream of mine, which is, of course, to see my work being read by a person in a luchador mask and suspenders.

Classiness: Aforementioned luchador mask and suspenders. 16/20
Quality of photography: The angle and setting could use some imagination. 13/30
Creativity: Where’s the action? I get that this is a bookish luchador, but that ain’t the event I bought tickets for. 18/50
Description: Clear enough! +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 52/100

In which Alex only has as many books as she could carry.

(pictured: a puddle of books) It’s impossible, really, to carry such a sea of books as she owns. Others don’t understand how she could need so many books in the first place, but she breathes the stuff. She is, without a doubt, a bibliophibian. Also, she has a nice hat.

Alex models the Bibliophibian shirt to nice effect. Past the point of no return, she feels the ink in her lungs, and she smiles. SCORES:

Classiness: She does have a nice hat. 12/20
Quality of photography: Sufficiently moody. 20/30
Creativity: I must ask again, as I did with the other Alex: is this a pose or just a natural state of being? 30/50
Description: Nicely done. +9/10

TOTAL SCORE: 71/100

In which Herschel waxes intellectual about petty concerns

The Alderman had the singular ability to derive rather stunning insights from the most trivial reading material.

Another from Paolo. I’ve looked at this photo a dozen times now and I only just realized that those weren’t his real eyes.

Classiness: The celebrated disguise is class personified. 14/20
Quality of photography: A bit flat but fine. 13/30
Creativity: I have a feeling Paolo just looked around for things he could wear to make the photo interesting. STILL: I am game enough to expand my lifelong dream (above) to include any kind of vaguely creepy mask, so this counts. 25/50
Description: Does its job. (But “trivial”??) +5/10

TOTAL SCORE: 61/100

Bibliophibian

Instead of spending all the money on her book collection, she should have spent a few dollars on a life vest too. She was too invested in reading to notice that she was drowning in it too. Maybe with all the knowledge from her books, she can grow gills and become a bibliophibian.

Another from Alex II, same as above. Clearly this photo was taken earlier in the evolution/conversion/assimilation process. SCORES:

Classiness: I don’t even know how to define this anymore. 10/20
Quality of photography: Strongly dramatic, highly evocative. Would like to have seen the shirt a little better maybe? 28/30
Creativity: Again, is this just Alex’s daily life? Still, a nice pose and a nice shot. 38/50
Description: A cautionary tale for the ages. +8/10

TOTAL SCORE: 84/100

Megan and Helena being extraordinarily classy whilst perusing the wondrous Wondermark anthologies.

There was going to be a third in this photo, but our canine counterpart was being less than cooperative. Thus, the third top hat is being worn by none other than the Classy Chair.

If classy can be defined as “wearing a top hat”, how do we define *3* top hats?

Very strong entry. The sepia filter is a bit of a cheat but it’s one I’m certainly not above using myself. High marks for the full costumes (and of course, the full complement of books.) SCORES:

Classiness: It is impossible to get classier than this. 20/20
Quality of photography: A bit staid but nicely evocative. 25/30
Creativity: The question remains! Is this simply a regular day in their life?? 36/50
Description: Does the job but makes me miss that dog! +7/10

TOTAL SCORE: 88/100

NOW. Before announcing all the winners and prizes, let’s turn our attention back to the Recreate-a-Panel photos (which are all so super wonderful). You voted for your favorites from that set, and the results, as of this writing are:

So the winner of that category is Diny the Stegosaurus and friend:

Which is awful hard to beat. Congrats, team! You win one of anything you like from either Wondermark store (either my own or TopatoCo).

The winner of the photos on this page is Megan & Helena with their extra-classy shot! Megan & Helena win one of anything they like from either Wondermark store. Congrats & thanks for the picture!

An honorable mention goes to Alex the Bibliophibian as well, just because I really like that shot of her reaching out of the books. Alex, let me give you one of my books to add to that stack, if there are any of my own that you’re missing.

And finally…my discretionary award for BEST IN SHOW goes to…

Just because I want to look at this picture and nothing else for the rest of my life. I will take to the grave the fact that I made people do this. Simply wonderful.

I should also mention that this photo is brought to you by the team that also contributed the Stove cat photo, the Leopold photo, and the photos above featuring Foppish Bear. So this is a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award as well. Nice work! You win $100 cash!

Winners please email me to claim your prizes: dave at wondermark dot com. Thanks everyone!

I’m super-pleased to announce some neat new things for the holidays! Quick links:

1. General Holiday Shipping Notes
    
2. New Greeting Cards!
      Description below / Store link
    
3. Artist Editions now available!
      Description below / Store link
    
4. New book: The Compleat Dispatches from Wondermark Manor!
      Description below / Store link

(more…)

I wrote a song! It has been running through my mind for a long time, and I finally said “You know what? It is time to FINISH THIS. Time to lay it down. Time to make it the PARTY HIT OF THE SUMMER.”

Boom! And a Bear Comes Out from David Malki ! on Vimeo.

(Download the MP3)

I hope you like it!

If you also have a nagging “cool thing” that you need an excuse to finish, why not submit something to the Machine of Death Talent Show? We’ve pushed back the submission deadline to April 20, and we will accept video performances from remote participants (although if you’re in the Los Angeles area, we’d love to physically put you on the stage)!

More info here. If you can’t submit something, we hope you’ll at least watch the show on the evening of April 26, either live in Los Angeles or livestreamed at MachineofDeath.net. Here’s the Facebook event!

I will tease you with this as well: everyone who’s able to attend the show in person will go home with a very special item that we’ll be unveiling the evening of.

Admission will be free, so if you can’t make it, send your Los Angeleno friends!

Thank you kindly for the great advice regarding my plastics conundrum! I have been in touch with several kind individuals and I hope to have the situation well in hand forthwith.

I am also pleased to announce that the 2011 Wondermark Calendar is now available for pre-order!

This will be the fourth year I’ve offered the calendar, and every year they sell out. The calendars are produced by hand and are individually signed and numbered! They’re mailed in the order that they were ordered, so the first buyer will get #1 (which is already gone!) and the last, #175. To get the lowest possible number, order now! Do the numbers matter? Not to me. But maybe to you???

Last year I wrote a very detailed explanation of how we create the calendars. I looked back through it today and I’m really pleased with how it reads! If you missed it last year, definitely take a look. I think it’s pretty interesting!

IN OTHER NEWS

Here are three brand-new Monocle Poppers™ holiday cards I’ve created just for you:

These add to my existing catalog of holiday cards to make nine designs total! Plus the various blank notecards, thank-you cards and the all-powerful Every Occasion Card. And remember that you get steep discounts for multiple cards! Basically what I am saying is that I got you covered. If you need cards, I am your man.

SPECIAL NOTE: The calendars will ship later in December, but I know you need holiday cards in-hand earlier so I’ll be sending all card orders out ASAP. Feel free to combine both in one order, and I’ll send the cards out right away even if the calendar has to follow later on.

(Non-US customers: Priority Mail is always your better bet in terms of expedient shipping. International First Class simply cannot be predicted nor guaranteed.)

FINALLY

Here is a new offering in the ol’ dry-goods concern: loose pages from old books for use in crafting, collage, or really anything you like (I won’t judge):

These are the lovely remnants after I have mined old volumes for their usable images! I am making them available in packs of about 100 pages each. See, I’m starting to fill box after box with these pages and I figure someone else can put them to better use than I can! They’d be great for all sorts of craft projects or just lining a drawer in that armoire you found on Craigslist.

Some covers are available too, for your journal or what-have-you! You do what you like. I’m just the enabler.

AND A BRIEF NOTE

Regarding Wondermark books, posters, shirts etc. from TopatoCo: that fine institution has posted its holiday ordering guidelines which I recommend taking a hearty peek at! However I will also mention that I do have one brand-new shirt in the TopatoCo pipeline which has yet to appear — hopefully that will show its face soon.

SO THAT’S WHAT I GOT

For some of you, this image is all you need to know.

You remember my call for submissions for this anthology, based on a Dinosaur Comic that postulated the idea of a machine that could predict how a person would die. You recall me talking about the 700 submissions we received, and how we whittled it down to 30. You’ve asked me at conventions for the last four years — “When’s Machine of Death coming out? What’s the story with that? I really want to read that book!”

The answer is: October 26. Tuesday.

For the unfamiliar, here’s a bit of the premise:

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.

The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall. You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least, consistent.

The book contains 34 stories by folks such as me, Ryan North, Randall Munroe, Shaenon Garrity, Yahtzee Croshaw, Erin McKean, James Lafond Sutter and a bunch of other great people. The stories are illustrated by folks such as Kate Beaton, Kazu Kibuishi, Aaron Diaz, Karl Kerschl, Jeffrey Brown, Scott Campbell, Cameron Stewart, Adam Koford and just too many more people to list. (Although at that link we try.) We’re also doing an audiobook that’s narrated by folks I can’t even mention yet.

Here is the significance of October 26 specifically:

It only takes a few hundred sales in a short time to become a Number One bestseller on Amazon.com.

So even though the book is available for purchase now, we want to concentrate all the attention onto October 26. Blog about it, tweet about it, invite your friends to the Facebook event — just spread the word that October 26 is the day to buy Machine of Death on Amazon.

We talk about the whole deal some more at the official Machine of Death site:

The simple truth is that we probably can’t compete on the shelves at Barnes & Noble alongside every other book in the world. The agents and the publishers are right; it might not work for a mass market. That’s okay. We don’t need to sell it to everyone. We don’t need to sell 100,000 copies; we don’t have the rent on a New York office to pay for.

We only need to sell it to you.

On October 26, we want to send a message that a little project dragged kicking and screaming from “crazy idea” past “it’ll never work” all the way to “By God, they actually did it” can make a big splash. We’re internet people; you are too. We want to prove to all the people who said “this will never sell” that internet people make things happen.

Here’s the link to that post explaining everything: http://machineofdeath.net/a/mod-day

Here’s the book on Amazon — tack your own affiliate link on there and make a few bucks, we don’t mind: http://machineofdeath.net/oct26/

Here’s the Facebook event.

Here’s our faces when everybody pitches in and we take the world by storm:

Buy it on October 26! Spread the word! And thank you!

I hope you’ve been listening to my weekly comedy podcast, Tweet Me Harder! If you haven’t, there’s absolutely no better time to start — the latest episode that’s been posted, Episode 30, may be our best yet. I’m super-pleased with how the show’s been progressing and developing over the last few months, and if you like the voice and temperament behind Wondermark, I’m confident recommending TMH to you as well.

In fact HERE IS THE EPISODE IN QUESTION for your listening pleasure:

(direct MP3 link)

We’re engaged in a concerted campaign right now to get noticed by the folks at iTunes who decide on the “staff picks,” which are podcasts that are given special precedence in the iTunes directory. If you’re an iTunes user, and you enjoy the show, there are two things you can do to help:

- You can subscribe to the podcast using this direct iTunes link, which is what determines our popularity ranking;
- You can rate and/or comment on the show in iTunes!

And, of course, there is one thing that you can always do, iTunes user or not, TMH fan or not… you can give yourself a big ol’ hug. Why not? (Unless you are spiky)

Now Put A Bow On It

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Although the printing is complete, and the room no longer smells like denatured alcohol & paint thinner (except for the splash I’ve added to my coffee for a little pick-me-up), there’s a bit more to be done before the calendars are Formally Finished. Once the covers are signed and numbered, all the cards are collated into sets and double-checked to make sure nobody’s getting two Augusts or getting shorted a February. Although I do want to sow a sense of existential ennui among the populace at large, we now have too many external calendar systems for any minor rebellion here to be tremendously effective, and I will save my efforts in that realm for more grandiose schemes.

Last year, we collated the cards by setting the stacks around a table and then continually circling the table over and over, picking up a card from each successive stack like it was the world’s most obsessive comic-convention freebie table. That was a very dizzy way to do things. This year we just kinda put them in a long row and then walked down the row a bunch of times.

With the cards collated, they’re then SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION into little capsule units that can be thrust headlong into our shipping workflow:

And these, along with the easels if desired, are what customers get! We spent the full day yesterday packaging and shipping, and I’m pleased to announce both that: all pending pre-orders have been sent, and all new orders are shipping out immediately. As of this writing, less than two dozen copies remain. Please, if you’ve been on the fence about ordering, don’t delay — I’d hate for you to miss out. UPDATE: You guys are too much. They are all gone!

(I will also be a little sheepish here and say that if they sell out while I’m asleep tonight, and I’m unable to update the store in time, please forgive me if I have to write an apologetic email. Hopefully this won’t happen.) ack

That buzzkill aside! I am so tremendously pleased with how this whole process has gone that I can hardly tell you. (Though you cannot fault me for trying.) Whether you buy a calendar or not, whether this has inspired you to make anything creative of your own or not, whether you’re even the least bit interested in this process or not, I hope you take one key thing away from this entire, long-winded story. I’ll put it on its own line and bold it so you’re sure not to miss it:

You can make something from nothing.

Let me repeat that. You can make something from nothing. The Wondermark Calendar is not a model kit that we assembled from directions. It’s not a box of LEGO® brand interlocking building blocks that we dumped onto the floor and then very precisely made into a spaceship. The LEGO® brand interlocking building blocks that we used were paper and ink. Any meaning that they have been given is meaning that we have fabricated.

You can do this too. I’m not saying you should necessarily make a calendar, or start hunting eBay for a GOCCO, or anything so specific — I’m saying that the tools and the effort and the materials and the sweat that went into our project are nothing my wife and I have a monopoly on. They are not hard to fathom nor out of reach. It just takes work: exposing yourself to ideas, swishing them around with other ideas and original notions, being a bit of a perfectionist at times, and just working at it. I know I’m never so satisfied with my job as when I sit down and make things that used to not exist.

(click)

I’m going to stop there; you can run with that ball anywhere you like, or leave it be, as you prefer. I just think it’s neat that there was nothing and then I had some cockamamie idea and figured out where to buy paper and stuff and then, a bunch of man-hours and problem-solving later, there is something. This is a thing we wrestled into existence. If you buy one of our things, you will be getting a tidy little package made of paper, ink, brass, and force of will.

If this calendar stays in your house, in the most quiet stillness of an afternoon when everything is at an ebb — if you get very close, close enough to see the fibers and detect the thin mounding of the ink over the paper — and if you hold your breath and if your refrigerator isn’t on and if the pets are all napping and nobody’s trying to email you right then –

– If the rest of the world is silent, and if the light catches it just perfectly right, I do believe you will see this thing’s heartbeat.

Thanks very much for all your kind attention this week, and for your wonderfully flattering patronage. While I was writing this, I went back and checked and it looks like one more has sold. I am serious. Get one now, if ever. UPDATE: They are gone, compadre. Wowsers.

Printing Pluperfect

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

With screens prepared and supplies obtained, it’s time to print! Each screen is inked (above), affixed to the GOCCO, and THE PRINTING BEGIIIIIINS

One new challenge we had this year with the thermofax screens was the concept of cleaning and re-using the plastic frames. At the end of a run, the screens typically end up looking like this:

With the help of magical chemicals, we scrape and clean the ink off each frame, the mesh screen itself gracefully retired with the dignity due a hero whose job has been completed with honor (i.e., it’s tossed into the trash). Then, using several flavors of tape and tape-like compounds, a new screen is affixed to each frame! THE CYCLE BEGINS ANEW.

To be quite honest, this is a messy, time-consuming and smelly part of the process, and for those considering doing a similar project, definitely consider having all your screens mounted on separate frames ahead of time. It might be a much smarter use of time and energy than cleaning all these ridiculous little frames and running out to get more double-sided tape and cursing the heavens because a screen was adhered slightly crooked because you are not as good at doing this as someone who has set up a business doing it and has likely done it many more times more than you have. Takeaway business advice: Delegate, delegate, delegate.

Still, time-consuming or no, the method does work! Using just those six frames, we successfully printed 38 screens’ worth of designs onto over two thousand individual cards.

Now comes the fun part!

Every single calendar is individually signed and numbered. And they’re sent out in order, so the later you buy, the higher number you’ll get in the series. Do people care about getting low numbers? I’m not sure. Anyway, if you do, time’s a-wastin’! As of this writing (Thursday morning), over half of the run of 150 have been sold, which means that the very lowest numbers are already gone — but there are still calendars available, which there won’t always be, and they’ll be shipping out as quickly as possible all the rest of this week with love and kindness included at no extra charge.

Most places charge extra for that! Or they bury the kindness cost in suspicious “handling fees”. We guarantee all our kindness is certified organic and hormone-free. It will absolutely not gum up the inside of the shipping envelope. (We have learned our lesson about that.) Seriously, it is good.

If you haven’t ordered yet, won’t you consider it? We have been working hard all month on something that you can enjoy all next year!

And to those who have ordered: thank you so very much! SHIPPING BEGINS TO-FREAKING-DAY

Supplies & Demand

Continued from Part 1 / Part 2

What do you need to make 150 calendars made of 14 cards each? Why, 2100 blank cards, of course!

I’m fortunate to have a wonderful paper store right in my neighborhood — Kelly Paper has some of the nicest, most knowledgeable staff around, and I love going in there and browsing their huge aisles full of paper stock. They also have overnight cutting services, so once I found the paper I wanted for this year’s calendar (a forest-green laid correction: linen for the covers and a natural-white linen for the interiors), I just told them how many sheets I wanted at what size, and they had it all nicely packaged and ready for me the following morning.

Also, I did the math wrong and ordered twice as much as I needed! THAT IS OKAY. I can always use nice paper for something. Maybe I will start doing daily sketches. It could be a New Year’s resolution.

BUT I GET AHEAD OF MYSELF

I also need easels! Two years ago, when I got the first batch of easels, I looked at a lot of styles before settling on this one — they’re bronze, hand-made in India and finished in either this dark coppery color, or in antique gold or pewter. They’re super-handsome, and all three colors go equally well with the rich palette of the calendar. I’ve toured the local office of the manufacturer/importer and spoken with the head dude in the U.S., and he explained how a portion of the proceeds from their easels go towards scholarships for kids in New Delhi. I am okay with that!

Perhaps by now you are getting a sense of how particular I am about every facet of this process? It’s why I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the calendar — because every dang piece of it has to pass through my super-fine high-mesh perfectionist-filter before I am satisfied. It makes for a tense existence but wowsers does the stuff come out excellent.

Next, it’s time to stock up on supplies for the ol’ GOCCO printer:

If you’re not familiar with Print GOCCO, it’s a Japanese screenprinting apparatus, popularized in the 1980s, that has since has been embraced by the modern crafting community. It’s easy to use and produces really cool, artisanal work — much more interesting than a computer printer can create, without being as complex or expensive as letterpress. You can read more about the history of GOCCO here!

The GOCCO uses several expendable supplies: ink, screens, and bulbs (used to create the screens). The screens and bulbs look like this:

Each screen is a fine mesh mounted on a cardboard frame. Typically the way it works is:

• You draw or print out your image.
• You make a photocopy of the image (to reduce it to pure black-and-white, and also there’s something special about copier toner that’s reactive with the screen).
• You place the photocopy and a blank screen inside the GOCCO and expose them to heat using the bulbs.
• The heat burns through a coating on the screen at the point of contact with the toner.
• Your screen is now “imaged” and ready for printing. When ink is pressed against the screen, it’s forced through at the burned areas, and makes an inked impression in the shape of your design.

Here’s a video I made a couple years ago showing some of that process.

So! All good, right? Wrong. See, the Japanese factory that manufactures the screens and bulbs has closed down due to the rising cost of materials and falling Japanese demand for the supplies! This has created a frenzy in the GOCCO community, and it’s made screens and bulbs hard to come by and expensive. Since we use 38 different screens for our calendar (plus mess-ups), and each screen requires spending two bulbs, this scarcity nearly sunk the project this year. (Thankfully the inks are still plentiful — for the moment at least.)

But never underestimate the cleverness of crafters! Folks have realized that there is an alternate way to image these screens: by feeding the coated mesh through a thermofax machine, which can “print” onto a screen using heat in the shape of a given design! HOW CLEVER. This handily eliminates the need for bulbs at all.

The screen fed through the printer must be loose and unmounted (on a roll), so it’s also necessary to mount the screen to frames that will fit the GOCCO. A crafter named Amy first tried doing so with cereal box cardboard, until discovering that an enterprising German fellow has started manufacturing reusable plastic frames specifically for this purpose!

Here is the takeaway business lesson: Find a niche of obsessive hobbyists that needs some goofy, super-specific thing that nobody else is bothering to provide, and provide it.

Because I wasn’t about to buy a thermofax machine, I contracted Amy to print my designs onto screens for me, and mount a small set of them onto the reusable frames. She did a great job! Here’s what they look like:

This was a much easier process than burning through hundreds of dollars’ worth of screens and bulbs at home! And I feel better about the lack of waste that the process generates, too. It does mean that everything I sent her to print had to be perfect, and it does mean that there is some messy, inky cleaning involved in re-using the frames, but those have proved to be very manageable concessions.

As described in Part 2, each card requires three separate screens — one each for the calendar grid, month title, and image/verse. I vectorized each illustration using Cocoapotrace so I could send Amy a PDF with 100% vector images — never having used the thermofax process before, I wanted to make sure we’d get the cleanest possible prints. I’m happy to report that they all turned out great!

This amassing of supplies — just the mechanics of choosing and ordering the paper, ordering the ink, having the screens made, etc. — takes a week or so, but once it’s all done, all that’s left to do is PRINT.

And that’s what we’re going to do — in tomorrow’s post!

Tomorrow: Part 4: Print That Baby

Writing (and more design)

Continued from Part 1

After composing each image, I like to print out each one to see how it looks on paper, then carry the papers around in my pockets for a while, scribbling on them whenever I come up with a scrap of verse. Taking walks is good for this — the rhythm of walking helps me think in poetic meter, but it’s also nice to be in front of a computer with rhymezone.com and OSX’s OED Thesaurus widget open.

It’s tough but fun coming up with explanations for all the weird images — some flow right out and others are a real challenge. Again, sometimes I’ll just start writing and see where it goes; other times I’ll get an idea for the gag or explanation for the image, and then have to work backwards to fill in all the details within the structure of rhyme and meter. When I think I’ve got something that makes sense, I’ll run it by a few other folks to make sure it tracks and makes sense — thanks are due to my wife Nikki and to Kris for late-night help at key points in this process!

The next step is to lay out each card for printing. I know there are neat calendar-generating plugins for InDesign and Excel templates you can download, but I didn’t use any of those because my life is made stronger by challenges. Kind Twitter volunteer @dharmakate helped lay out the grids and updated the dates for 2010!

Each year’s calendar has some sort of overall design theme — nothing specific, just an aesthetic that’s represented in the choice of fonts, layout of elements, etc. For example, here are some elements from the 2008 calendar:

…Which, because I like to make things new and better and not at all because I am obsessed with reinventing the wheel every single time I do anything (not at all, do you hear me), I changed the format to a slightly more modern look for 2009:

And now, for 2010, I decided to go more modern still — after years of immersion in the ephemeral art of the late 19th Century, I’m now starting to become fascinated by mass media from the 1910s, and I think this year’s design reflects that:

The use of flourishes and ornaments also allows some nice touches such as the crossbar of the ‘A’ in ‘August’.

Each month’s title, as well as the entirety of the title cards, will be printed in gold ink, and they can’t really be done justice by a graphic — they look really sharp. (The other printing is done in black ink — this year on natural-white linen cardstock.)

The calendar grids are all laid out in Illustrator. I use the amazing program Cocoapotrace to create vector versions of the final collaged images for each month, then place them on each card with their verses. The cards are each 8.5″ x 5.5″ (half of a standard US sheet of paper), but the GOCCO printer can only print on half that size — so the cards have to be laid out so that each element takes up no more than half the space. Each calendar grid, and each image/verse section, will be printed separately using its own screen. (Since the monthly titles will be gold, they’ll need their own screen as well. More on this later). But at this stage, for compositional purposes, I lay it all out as a unit, so I know how each final card will look — then I print these out to act as reference for the printing process.

Here’s the final card design for the image in the previous post. Tomorrow we’ll prepare to start printing!

Tomorrow: Part 3: The Gathering Storm