FALLiNGWATER

Time to print some more notebook covers, to get me to the 32 notebooks I want (that I still haven't worked out what to do with yet).

A couple of the photos I took yesterday (I was in a rush) were out of focus, so I've grabbed a couple more before heading down to London.

Popped into the other studio to have a go at printing out some of the FALLiNGWATER designs. The code isn't finished yet but I want to get an idea of how the final thing may look.

First thing, I love how the fluorescent pink pops, always!

As for the other, I was a little worried about how the "water" part would look, as that's a pretty fiddly bit of design, that's going to have to deal with the offset inaccuracies inherent in the riso printing process. I figured it's probably be okay, it's not really adding an extra "oh I love how the riso offset adds to the design", but it certainly doesn't take anything away either, it just is what it is.

Overall pretty pleased with how it's going.

I tried printing at a single A3 size, then 2-up with two A4 prints on a sheet. These were yellow and green, although the yellow is getting a bit lost, but perhaps I should have picked two slightly more different designs.

Also printed some pink & green 8-up A6 cards. I need to work on the border sizing a little on this, but one day I'll nail the proportions. I should try printing it out on the printer first to preview I guess.

Anyway, I like how these turned out, despite being a bit small. On the plus side I could always trim them down a bit more, which I'll probably do tbh.

Had a chance to come back to this code and so glad I did. Up to this point I pretty much only had a two colour gradient background done. Now I've added patterns and the floating buildings.

Here's a couple of screenshots of how the code and the output is looking.

The first two greyscale images are what's actually used by the Riso printer. You put the coloured ink drums for the colour you want the final design into the machine; so if you wanted a pink & yellow print, you'd put the pink & yellow ink drums in. You want different colours, then you have to swap them out.

Next the design gets "burns" onto a disposable screen on each drum. A bit like a screen-printing mesh, but it's wrapped around the ink drum.

In the case of the first screen-shot, the first greyscale image gets wrapped around the pink drum, and the second greyscale image gets wrapped around the green drum, and then we print.

I've made it so the code also spits out the design in each colour (randomly picked from the ink colours we have), and then blends them together for a preview. The final design won't look exactly like that, 'cause some of the colours are too bright to properly represent on the screen 😁

Because the nature of the Riso printer is that you "burn" the designs once and then print off a load of copies (it's kinda a photocopier mixed with a screen-printer), you're not really printing one-off design, a staple of generative art.

You definitely wouldn't do it at a print shop where you're getting charged the setup cost for each master.

But you may do it if you own the machine and have the time to bother 😉

The Riso prints won't look like this, of course, as riso has it's own whole look and feel. I did want to print these out so I could get a feel for how that may look.

What I really love about these though it how it's using a very similar process to the Riso machine behind the scenes, in that it's generated from two separate greyscale images, that are then given a colour and combined together.

Each of these are made up of just two colours, and I think that constraint is making them look pretty good.

Next step is to add the actual falling water part of FALLiNGWATER, and a few more design elements. I'm still stuck in the same position of really liking some outputs when they're super sparse and others when they're dense with lots going on.

Seven of the eight notebooks have come back from home all sewn up, the last one was missing a page so now it has to wait. I think I'm up-to 25 out of 32 now, so nearly there.

Started printing the second batch of covers and paper for the notebooks, mainly so I have something to take home and sew as I'm avoiding doing computer stuff in the evening. Nice to have some more things to do.

Got the first batch of FALLiNGWATER notebooks done. There's going to be 32 in total and I need to design some "belly bands" for them still, but beyond that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them.

Another one of those of those projects where I really should go and back-fill all the information we have about it so far. FALLiNGWATER was/is a generative art project of mine that released on Alba, as part of their print inspired gallery thingy.

I've had a super soft spot for FALLiNGWATER every since, and keep coming back to it, changing the format a little, getting it to output SVG versions for pen plotting and the like.

The main design was created with posters in mind, specifically portrait style with verticality going on, but I wanted to have a go at making a series of notebooks out of them. 32 generative notebooks to be exact. For this I wanted the main design to be on the right hand side, but other parts of the design to wrap around to the back. With some tweaking of the code, which basically boiled down to "Do what you were doing before, but shift everything to the right, apart from the background, and then extend some horizontal elements all the way across the page".

Then I got the code to spit out hundreds of designs, and picked a few that I like.

Here they are looking nice and colourful, and will soon become notebooks.