Holiday Cards 2025

Inspired by Alien Sunset ‘s recent stamp making inspired by medieval marginalia, I did some image searching and landed on this blog post, Musicians of Medieval Marginalia

From which I grabbed the following picture

At least 3 recent years, I have found or made a festive design and the burned a gocco screen and handprinted the cards with my gocco printer. I was sort of planning to do that again this year - but I needed to get it down to one color on a clean background. (I feel like selecting areas was a thing we used to be able to do in photoshop, but I do not have photoshop.)

I used the Photos app, I used Preview, I did terrible terrible things to the contrast and sharpness. I used Inkscape for the first time, and fumbled around pretty hard. I tried to make a fully white background, with a series of white shapes and sprayed shapes and so on. But when I did a test print, my printer happily showed every edge of white and printed the pale off white background.

I held that printout up to my sliding glass backdoor during the day and traced the parts of the image I loved most. I “inked” it - first finding out that all my crayola markers are very sad, then using a sharpie for most of it, and Pilot Varsity pen for the finer lines. I took a picture of the resulting paper.

I cropped it to the art and removed the background in Preview. It did an OK job, but missed a part of the middle that I would have really rather had transparent. I failed to find a way to select that section and delete it in Inkscape.

Because the rabbit and the negative space right below it refused to become transparent, I didn’t feel good about trying to burn a gocco screen - screen printing doesn’t care how faint you wanted to print things, it’s very binary - you get ink or you don’t.

But it turns out that my trusty Brother laser printer can print weird sizes, including the 5”x7” flat non folded cards I bought for this project. I had to set up a custom size, learn to use the manual feed on my printer, and print each card one at a time. Other than burning a screen and drying time, it was probably as time consuming as gocco printing would have been!