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Posted by Jason Urban on November 25th, 2009 | Vintage Printable is your resource for printable vintage illustration scans. To the best of their knowledge, everything on the site is copyright-free though they do post a well-considered disclaimer that’s worth a read.
They have tons of antique illustrations with a particular focus on the scientific, medical, and naturalist genres. Of course, they also have holiday illustrations as pictured here…
 Great table setting chart- when did boiled turkey fall out of favor?
Posted by Jason Urban on August 16th, 2009 | 
In the ongoing quest to empower the people with printing technology, a new player has entered the fray: Yudu. An all-in-one exposing/drying/printing unit, the Yudu screen-printing system has the look of a desktop printer. To quote, “don’t settle for what everyone else is wearing or spend hours futilely trying to find a t-shirt that expresses the real you.” Finally, there’s a way to express yourself on a t-shirt!
It only takes few moments of this youtube promo to realize that Yudu isn’t just a printer, it’s a tool for empowerment. It’s out to change the world, one t-shirt at a time!
The rest of the promo commercials on the Yudu site are priceless. We can’t embed them but you can see them here. To be fair, I can’t really speak to the actual usability of the product, but I can’t be the only person who thinks that most of these “screen-printing systems” will be collecting dust in their owners’ respective garages within a week of purchase.
 This example sums it all up- anyone who makes this t-shirt needs rules.
Posted by Jason Urban on July 3rd, 2009 | 
Originally written in seventies but updated and rereleased as recently as 1996, Studio Tips for Artists and Graphic Designers by Bill Gray is a book that archives old school paste-up practices. The secrets of the pre-digital studio are revealed! From the obvious to obtuse, all manner of practical issue is addressed through text and accompanying illustrations. If some super-virus ever destroys our computers, you’ll be sorry you don’t have copy of this resource. Used copies are available on Amazon for as low as 75 cents!!!
Some pages on print and paper handling…
 Printeresting doesn’t recommend #2. Ouch.
Posted by RL Tillman on June 22nd, 2009 | DIY-ers! Behold the well-named, kookily disorganized Screenulacra:
Project Screenulacra explores and develops different possibilities in Silkscreening. We embrace the Do It Yourself approach. Working on visual and technical transformation of already existing elements and combining the individuality of secondhand clothes with the character of silkscreen printing. The Project shares knowledge through workshops and connections with other groups.
Be sure to check out the interactive “How To Make” section (although it seems to be a work-in-progress).
“Screenulacra!” Names just don’t get any better than that.
Posted by Jason Urban on June 19th, 2009 |
Posted by amze on June 18th, 2009 | 
Windell Oskay, Lenore Edman and Chris Brookfield constitute the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a collective of .. well, mad scientists who make some very cool stuff. In keeping to their open source code, they make their inventions available to the larger public via their website and flikr slide shows. In 2007 they started working on a DIY 3D printer that used sugar to make some the greatest rock candy the world has ever known.
Candyfab 4000, top of the line 3D sugar printer, circa 2007
 It’s always best to test on white bread first.
 The updated CandyFab 6000 now in Beta testing.
While it may look like some new superior form of breakfast cereal, the geometry above is made entirely out of sugar. Yummers!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has also cranked some other printeresting project in the past. Here is just a sampling.
 DIY stickers for organic farmers.
 And the classic “Don’t Fear Art” bumper sticker.
Posted by Jason Urban on February 15th, 2009 | This is something I’ve been meaning to add for a few weeks now. It’s somewhat tangential to printmaking but will likely have broader ramifications on the future definition of “print”. We’ve been talking about the death of the printing industry but I think there is a flip side to that as well… new technologies that offer new possibilities. Speaking of Darwin, we can look to him for the key: adaptation.
There have been a few posts at printeresting on the subject of 3-D printers (see here and here). RepRap is an open source 3-D printer project started by Dr. Adrian Bowyer and a team of engineers at the University of Bath in England. One of Bowyer’s ultimate goals with RepRap is to make a machine that can self-replicate. He named the first RepRap model Darwin and his reasoning is as follows…
Since childhood I have wanted to make a replicating machine, but the genesis of RepRap was my realisation that, in order to succeed, such a machine would have to live and to evolve symbiotically with people.
But which symbiosis to copy biomimetically? I decided upon the one between the flowers and the insects. I reasoned: why not make a machine that needs the help of people to reproduce, just as the clover needs the bee to carry its pollen? And why not have the machine make goods for the people to reward them for their help, just as the clover makes nectar to reward the bee? Such a machine should prosper with Darwinian stablity alongside its human collaborators.
This seems to be a kind of scientific “chicken or the egg” situation and has generated some seriously heated dialogue. Here’s an example of the strong case against the likelihood of machine self-replication. The debate is fascinating even if somewhat dizzying. Regardless of the potential for self-replication, this kind of technology really blows the lid off the potential for desktop publishing and could put another nail in the coffin of supply-side economic theory.
It seems very possible that in the future, artists will be “printing” more sculpture than two-dimensional works on paper.
Posted by RL Tillman on December 2nd, 2008 | Many American households this week after Thanksgiving are burdened with a surplus of unused ingredients. What are you gonna do with that leftover sugar and unflavored gelatin powder? And how will you ever use 715 grams of glycerin?
Hmmm. I suppose you could whip up a nice pan of hectographic duplicator. If you misplaced your granny’s recipe for jellygraph, you can download instructions from Better Times Almanac of Useful Information’s Emergency Notes:
A hectographic duplicator is a firm bed of gelatin made with a special recipe. A master copy made with hectographic ink or pencils is placed face down on the bed and the ink transfers to the gelatin. The master is taken off and blank sheets of paper are laid on the gelatin, producing from 30 to 50 or so copies. Hectographic copying has a long history of utilization in extreme situations such as prisoner of war camps, the Soviet gulag, and in civilian societies under tyrannical governments or foreign occupation. It does not need electricity and the materials are commonly available.
There are also useful instructional videos on YouTube:
Before you get into this, please note that it’s not safe to eat your pan of hectographic gelatin, no matter how good it tastes. And you’re advised to check out Tom Trusky’s hecto experiments at Boise State. You might end up with a bit of a mess in the kitchen:
Posted by RL Tillman on September 27th, 2008 | 
Etsy user lilimandrill is selling this hand-carved Barack Obama stamp for just $8.
Posted by amze on July 26th, 2008 | 
Stop sharpening your old Xacto blades and put away your Amberlith, it’s time to equip your studio with a vinyl cutter. The vinyl cutter has been an established art making tool since Ryan McGinness popularized the medium in his work in the early 2000s, and it’s been pillar of the sign making industry for even longer. The vinyl cutter is an off-spring of the plotter-type printer, in which a pen is pulled across the surface of the paper as it’s fed through the machine. These type of printers are often used only for CAD printing these days. In the vinyl cutter the pen is replaced with a knife and the paper with any number of substrates, including, vinyl (with or without adhesive backing), plastic, foam rubber, tape, etc. In this way the vinyl cutter can be used to cut direct stencils, masks, decals and stickers. yes, stickers! And that list is only complete if you don’t violate the manufacturers recommendations and start feeding a roll of Kitakata through in some crazy chin-colle’ experiment.
And thanks to recent innovations in vector graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator one can easily convert hand drawn imagery, or any raster based image for that matter, into vector line art, a format used by all vinyl cutting software.
Think of the possibilities!
Think of the Stickers!
Below are some links to get you started. While you can build it from scratch it seems best if you have access to an old pen plotter (check craigslist or ebay).
How to for the hardware:
http://www.cuttingedgecnc.com/vinyl.htm
http://www.hackaday.com/2006/04/26/old-pen-plotter-converted-to-vinyl-cutter/
http://www.luberth.com/help/pen_plotter_vinyl_cutter_swivel_knive_drag.html
And while you are at it a degree in engineering probably wouldn’t hurt.
When you finally run out of energy I would recommend taking a look at the Summacut-R D60 made by the Belgium company Summa. It’s a real beauty, with a 24″ roll feed, advanced tracking and ‘the world’s most advanced optical sensor’; it cuts vinyl, reflective and fluorescent films, sandblast resist and other thick films, has a pen for plotting on paper and a pounce tool (pouncing?!!). Unlike many brands Summa is known for having very stable, user-friendly software that runs on the Mac OS. Oh yeah, the Summacut-R D60 costs a painful $2k. They do show-up for sale used on sign industry forums and if you frequent them with the regularity of an ebay junkie you just might find one.
World’s Most-Fanciest Xacto Knife.
Click image for lustful close-up.
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