A sticky situation?

Who knew that doing nothing could be so exhausting?

The printing of my final pieces is now finished. A quick jaunt over to Knightstone campus on the other side of town, and I found myself in the print room. Nothing surprising - pretty messy and running tech that was probably groundbreaking ten years ago.

We were given a 1 hour 15 slot to complete all of our printing. The first sight of this was my first little worry; someone had seriously underestimated the time it takes not just to print something, but to print it right.

To be fair, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the printer I was using - a Roland VP-540i. Very solid piece of kit, and it can print at a very high quality. Unfortunately, the PC that it was hooked up to was running Windows XP. Huh. Nothing wrong with XP either, but it's really not built for running complicated printing software. At all.

So if you're wondering how long the printing process actually took, let me cut to the chase. We arrived at the Knightstone print room at just after 10:30am. I started printing my two A1 pieces of artwork at about 4 o'clock. And by just after 7:00pm, I was home.

Thankfully, I'd only had to do one reprint - but talk about suffering for your art...

But at least it's done. Here are a few photos and details of the printing process.

Okay, so here's the printer - printing. Really a very clever machine - the media (in this case, vinyl) is fed into the back of the printer via a cylinder, and the artwork is printed on in very high quality as it goes through. After the printing itself is completed, the vinyl is retracted into the printer and a very fine blade cuts around the die-lines. The only problem is that it can take a while...

So here are the printed and cut QR codes. Unfortunately, Stuart the technician and I had set the depth and power of the blade incorrectly, so the cuts weren't deep enough for us to peel off the codes. There was no point in wasting these codes though, so we decided that I'd cut them out with a guillotine back at University campus.

Next, here's the finished deforestation piece printed and looking shiny. I decided to add a couple of extra elements in Illustrator before printing. The extra leaves around the tree and scissors were simple copies and transformations, whilst the oil dripping from the glue bottle and banknote were free-drawn. I think they look pretty good, especially with the white accents giving a reflective, viscous effect to the liquid.

And here are the main elements of the Spy vs Spy piece. I really like the way that this has turned out, everything is as clean and crisp as it looked on-screen in Illustrator. The Morse code section of the piece has been printed as a separate rectangular sticker to make a frame, which means that it's much easier to position on a wall, rather than having to mess about with thin, floppy stickers.

Speaking of which, here's the Morse code frame. As mentioned earlier, Stuart and I had got the original cutting settings a bit off. Thankfully though, this was quickly fixed by upping the depth and power of the blade, and also by telling the cutter to run two recuts of the die-lines.

Here are the QR codes cut using a guillotine. Quite easy, really - and they work just fine!

And here we have the full printed page. The printer is genius because it cuts the paper off after the print job is finished, which saves paper and means that everything is easier to transport. This is especially useful for vinyl because when it isn't dead straight, it tends to develop creases which can become near-permanent if the sheet isn't straightened quickly. Thankfully mine held out, and when I got back to University campus, I pinned them to the wall to make sure they stayed straight.

So there we go, final pieces ready to go up on the wall. And just in time, too - today I found out that one of the two print technicians is off injured, and the printer has broken down, and Stuart (the main technician) is going on holiday soon. I don't blame him...