A New Toy!

(literally.)

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon this.

It’s a toy camera on Amazon that spits out thermal prints. (Like a cash register receipt.). It also does super crappy video and there are a few kiddie games on it, but that’s not the funnest bit.

It’s the oddly clear, yet also weirdly grainy photos like these:

I’ve been taking pictures multiple times a day, using them in my daily planner/journal notebook to encapsulate what I did that day. They’re small (about 2” x 3”), and they’re super-cheap compared to the color polaroid-style photo printers — twenty rolls of refill paper is about $12 (or less), and all of the photos you see in that picture, plus the daily ones I’ve stuck down already for the past few weeks, all came from one roll.

You’ve got the choice of two settings — a greyscale mode and a halftone mode that’s made of little dots. The quality is, obviously, dubious, and your results can vary pretty wildly. You have to kind of go into it like you’d approach thrift-store shopping: with a sense of adventure, just loving what you get, rather than looking for a specific result.

Sometimes, though, the results will be oddly good. That face up there is a close up of this drawing¹. I kind of love how the cheap black and white smoothed everything out and made it all high-contrast and vaguely creepy.

Because it’s that heat-sensitive printing, there are some things you can’t do with it — you definitely don’t want to display prints in the sun or over a space heater, even. Don’t microwave it². And don’t laminate it, or the thing that spits out of your laminator will be a black rectangle, nicely laminated³.

I have no idea if it’s lightfast, but my suspicion would be no. We’re talking very cheap prints, here. If you take a photo you particularly like, I’d strongly suggest scanning it or taking a photo of the printout with your phone for later printing on a not-two-cents-a-print regular printer.

You can scribble over the print with markers, if they’re transparent, adding old-timey colorization, too. My attempts with this have been…mixed. It’s easy to overdo it, and water-based markers take a LONG time to dry on this paper, which is semi-shiny. But even with several layers of wet marker, the paper holds up fairly well, so if you take multiple shots of your thing and play around with the prints, you can probably get some pretty neat results…if you aren’t totally impatient and smudge every single attempt because you can’t wait for it to dry completely⁴.

Also — there are multiple brands on Amazon, as happens with cheaply manufactured imports. The one I linked is the one I bought, but there are a bunch of options that range from around $29 with just one or two rolls of thermal paper, up to about $39 with a giant pack of those rolls, a carrying strap, a usb power cord, a 32GB memory card, and some super-cheap markers for coloring your prints⁵. There are even some that are shaped differently for kids, like whale or dinosaur cameras, but they all do pretty much the same thing for right around the same price⁶.

If you’ve got $30-ish just kicking around your pocket and want a way to put photos in your sketchbooks⁷ (or randomly, anywhere else), I think some of you might dig one of these⁸.

Another little updatey bit:

I’m planning on starting the encyclopedia/ABC Project this Friday, barring any life complications that arise between now and then. I’ve got the first volume all annotated and sketches of what I want to make all written and sketched out to try and make it easier to Make All The Things™.

I originally thought I’d give every volume two weeks, but it’s looking more like a month, realistically. Possibly six weeks. (I’m still planning on making a couple print illustrations, a pack of 3-ish stickers, a short zine that may or may not be put together individually or combined with other volumes, an oracle card or two, a small travellers notebook-size magpie book, and a fun little game with each…and that’s way too much for two weeks, even for me.)

This first round is the experiment to see how long things actually take, and whether or not I really want to make all of the things for each volume. I may end up doing them all for a volume or two and then tweaking that list. I don’t want to burn out and just light the rest of the set on fire or something⁹.

I’ll keep you folks in the loop first. It should be a fun ride.

Also: How’re y’all doing after all the stress this past week?

I’ve been alternately cleaning things to feel a sense of control and making things in a flurry to distract me from thinking too hard, myself. Check in and let me know you’re okay.

(I’m just glad fun cameras exist. Stuff as stress relief probably isn’t a good long-term solution, but here we are. :D)

1. Which, btw, was inspired by a board on Pinterest of “Victorian Rogues”. My friend Jill posted her sketches from it and the photo was just too fun not to piggyback from.

2. Which sounds silly, but sometimes folks write with those frixxion pens that erase with heat, and nuke their papers to erase them. Personally, I’d just toss the thing, but it’s still worth mentioning because that way lies heartache.

3. Ask me how I know… :D

4. Again, ask me how I know…

5. I just checked again, and it looks like the sales on them are off now, making most of them the $39-ish USD. BUT…the one I got has a 30% off coupon, which knocks it back down under $30, with the three rolls of paper. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they’ll be on supersale around Black Friday, since there’s so much competition.

6. I very much wanted the one that’s shaped kind of like a dog, with the print coming out of his mouth like a tongue, but my brain was all YOU ARE FIFTY YEARS OLD, and I caved to its peer pressure.

7. Or you have actual children, which I didn’t even think of until I was getting ready to post this. You can also use it for the purpose for which it was intended. Ahem.

8. note: not sponcon or anything. I’m just playing and sharing, because we all need some dopamine after this past week. It IS an amazon link, though, so I get a couple pennies from it if you buy one at the link. Blah blah blah FCC regulations, blah.

9. I am nothing if not slightly melodramatic in any and all situations. Clearly.