Think Ink With Laser Focus

An art tradition I've been keeping to for about as long as Inktober is my holiday card. This year marks number 4 in a series of winter/holiday-themed postcards that get physically mailed out to an increasing list of friends and family. 

Overall, this is the most use my printer gets in a year, meaning I typically only have to buy ink once a year. This year, however, marks the first time I've had to go back for ink after exhausting the previous refills. I blame myself; this year's card is much more colorful while last year's was easily the most minimalistic (to the point I almost felt guilty about sending it out, like I was shortchanging everyone). In any case, the cartridges aren't particularly expensive, even for an inkjet printer. If you didn't know, the reason for ink cartridges being as expensive as they are is a way to keep the initial upfront cost of the printer down. In my case, my printer's cost was kept especially down because I bought it as part of a Black Friday deal in 2017. 

The real irony of this printer is that although it's marketed as a business printer, what with it looking like a miniature Xerox machine and all its product photos showing it print up super serious business-type stuff like invoices and graphs, it's one of the worst printers I've ever had for documents. I'm not kidding when I say I have to try at least two or three times to get a page of anything to look right. However, when it comes to printing photos, the thing that's basically an afterthought, it's pretty damn good. Printing borderless is a bit tricky, but I blame the software more than anything. If I need to print a document and I literally used it the day before, I have to recalibrate it, or I'm just going to be getting an unreadable mess of pink and yellow dots in a grid that looks nothing like the bulleted list I'd written up in Google Docs. If I print up a 4x6 photo, when I haven't used the thing in months, it gets it right the first time every time. That should make me want to beat the Epson crew with a stick, but it's rather sort of bolstered my respect for them and makes me want to stay. 

Touching back on the touchy subject of overpriced ink cartridges, even if I spring for the whole package with the extra large black cartridge (no such option for any of the colors), it's maybe 5 or 10USD more than the printer's original cost. Couple that with rarely if ever needing to print a document, and I'd call this one a victory. 

Upgrades are inevitable, though. While the ink is still available, every compatible model listed on its label has been discontinued for about as long as mine has, which was the year I bought it because it wasn't just any Black Friday deal, but a clearance deal on Black Friday. Any lower, and they'd pay me to take it, is my point. Also, as much as I borderline admire its ability to almost exclusively make art prints, I know it's still not the best that's out there and I've reached a point where I can be a little more choosy and discerning in my equipment. Most photo printers out there have more than the typical Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow cartridges, with some adding a Light Cyan and Magenta to further the color range. At least one model in Epson's catalog boasts Gray and Red cartridges to round out the gamut. That's hard core, right there. I'm still doing my research, and it seems a certain global event has caused some supply issues on Epson's side of things. Nearly everything is listed as out of stock besides their paper and ink. Many models are still available from external sites like B&H or Microcenter, but I'm still taking it as a sign to wait. I'll know for sure when I step out of the H&R Block in February. 

The world is a carousel of Blood and Stone! 

Okay, real and proper red ink is awesome and all, but what if I still need to print a document? I mean, the photo printers will be fine when the time comes, but I feel this is missing a trick. I've more or less come to the conclusion that when I print a photo on my current printer, it messes up the alignment of the heads so that plain documents come out looking awful. Newer printers or ones more dedicated to photos likely won't have this problem, but I think my solution is going to be getting two separate printers. One will be for photos, and one will be for documents, plus a special bag of chips I'll pop open in a moment. 

Outside of your work, the printers you're likely most used to are known as inkjet. We're not going to get into the nitty-gritty nuts-and-bolts of what that technically means. The most important takeaway is it uses ink cartridges that have to be replaced semi-frequently after a relatively small number of prints. I say "relatively" because if you work in a place that has to print a lot of documents, you're probably somewhat familiar with a laser printer. Again, without popping the bonnet on the inner workings, the main difference is that instead of small cartridges full of ink, laser printers have large cartridges of toner, sometimes referred to as drums. Toner is still technically ink, but it's a slightly different chemical mixture due to how the printer works. The key advantage of laser printers is, even out the box with the "starter kit" cartridge, they can print hundreds of pages, with full cartridges on some models reaching over 1,000. Yes, they are more expensive than inkjet cartridges, but they're still replaced far less frequently. They also print fairly fast. While color options exist, they're supposedly not that great at printing photos. In fact, most of them can't handle anything beyond plain typing paper. This makes the research a little tricky as it's not always consistent from site to site which printers can handle things like envelopes or, more importantly, card stock. 

So, why a laser printer at all? More importantly, where's that bag of chips promised? Well, many years ago, I learned of an extra special little trick that laser printers can do with gold leaf and a laminator. I have no clue who discovered this, but whoever they are, they are a legitimate and fully-certified genius. You simply have to see it to believe it. 

Oh, and did I mention gold leaf comes in other metals? Also, black paper exists. Think about it. 

2019

I don't like New Year's Resolutions, not because they're unrealistic and onerous, but because they're laid out on an arbitrary and unnecessary timeline. It's like the so-called Holiday Spirit. It's disappointing that we push all these charity drives and giving sprees to the end of the year, as if to say, "You've all been such good little needy folk this year, here's your reward. We wanted to make sure it's what you truly needed. Now run along, you little scamps." 

Yes, that's very cynical and hyperbolic, and I don't pretend it's the norm or the reality, more a kind of mental distillation of behaviors observed in others through a lens as myopic as it is mortal. It's as much a nagging voice in the back of my head as it is a patronizing condescension to everyone else I'm repeating it to. We're all in this together, and that's precisely my point.

It's never too late to do the right thing, and it's also never too early. If there's something you want to improve about yourself, especially in regards to how you treat others (all the good thoughts in existence will never have one-tenth the impact of a single good deed), then don't wait for some calendar to roll over a digit or two. 

InkTober

Holidays are funny things, many with storied histories ranging from quirky to downright dark. Many are holdovers from Pagan rituals while others mark historical events (birthdays, wars, deaths, etc.). These can be repurposed as religious holidays, their original meanings glossed over in an almost Orwellian fashion, and others get put through a Kafkaesque wringer of red tape for the sake of making 3-day weekends in February. I'm sure there's at least two holidays that were made up by greeting card companies to fill a gap in their schedule. Many controversies have been sparked over to what extent a holiday should be observed, especially in regards to school closures. Comedians have built careers on the reality of the crawling chaos that is Christmas, with Black Friday bleeding into Gray Thursday (while Small Business Saturday never quite catches on). 

As time goes on, I've found I get less and less enthusiastic for holidays, ignoring most altogether and avoiding whatever I get roped into. For example, I've plans to see my family in December, but to be long gone at least a good week before Christmas Day. I'm also having my own Thanksgiving dinner this year with my roommate due to various rifts in her family that have left it deeply splintered. Part of me is a bit nervous about this, mostly from people placing an alarming emphasis on specific days holding specific meaning. 

"But it's about spending time with loved ones! And if it's not on the day..." they cry out, to which I whisper back, "Who's says I'm not already doing that?" Seriously, I don't get the idea that somehow a gift from someone you care about is less important on one day than another. Sure, Christmas Every Day diminishes the, er, meaning or importance or significance or mojo or whatever, but it's not a comet during an eclipse, either. Still, it gives me pause. I wonder if I'm missing something, if I've just become some embittered Scrooge sitting in the corner with arms folded and punctuating the statement with a mighty, "Harumph!". 

Then I realized there was a double standard in my thinking. I was cynical towards "traditional" holidays, but "new" holidays were getting the No True Scotsman treatment by yours truly. I was saying Pi Day was dopey, Talk Like a Pirate Day was stupid (I mean, okay, it kind of is, but you'll see where I'm going with this), Palindrome dates are an excuse for semi-clever marketing (9-9-99, 11-11-11), and Christmas in July is just an excuse for kids in summer camp to make ornaments in Arts & Crafts. Now, when I see people posting their old photos for Throwback Thursday or adorable kitten videos for Caturday, I may not get as excited for it as I do New Year's, but events like NaNoWriMo come closer than Talk Like A Pirate Day ever could. Tumblr taught me that October is Black Cat Month, when cat lovers paradoxically raise awareness about violence against black cats around Halloween as well as their statistically lower adoption rates while many shelters set moratoriums on adoption because of the aforementioned violence. I think it's great to see people get excited like this over some shared interest. My point is it's as valid as any other holiday, even if you don't get the day off. 

As much as talking about black cats got me riled up, I'm simultaneously "celebrating" black cat month with another internet-inspired holiday: Inktober. Started by illustrator Jake Parker back in 2009 as a challenge to himself, the idea is simple: each day has a word or other kind of prompt attached to it, and you make an ink-based illustration for each one. Proper hashtags are applied when posted to social media to make your work searchable for other participants and onlookers, and you get to see radically different interpretations of the same given theme. There's a few other takes on it, different prompt lists or simply keeping the "one per day" part. There's no wrong way to participate, really, but I decided to stick with the original, and have been for the past week. 

I am doing things a little differently, though, if only by my own standards. I've been drawing digitally almost exclusively for around a full year, off and on for maybe another two. Despite my misgivings, I have generally not missed working traditionally, especially the scanning and photographing and editing of pieces before being uploaded and posted to my DeviantART or ArtStation or even Twitter. For this Inktober, I thought it might be fun to go back to the simple purity of ink and paper, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of scanning. So, I made a kind of compromise. The drawings I post to my Instagram (where this event really seems to come alive) are taken with my iPhone, sometimes at odd angles and many times with shadows left in, and then edited in some program like Aviary or Pixlr or Paper. The edits are generally cosmetic, mostly tilt shift focus or vignetting or color filters, and no new lines are added to the original drawing nor is any part of the drawing erased (only cropped). 

Whatever you celebrate, have fun with it. 

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