Riso Printing Crash Course Attendee

Last weekend, I took a crash course in riso printing. I like taking the occasional class, be it a crash course, or semester-long class. Besides learning something new, it gives me something to do and something to look forward to after a long day at work. Trying something new was also a goal for this year, so I’m feeling pretty accomplished so far.

There’s this local studio, actually a few blocks away from my job that offers classes and a membership in which you can use their facilities. My plan was to take the risograph class and hopefully after feeling comfortable enough to use it, I’d sign up for a membership.

So the risograph is a Japanese duplicator machine. It’s kinda living in the underground right now because there’s not much information about it out there. It’s intended for just making copies, not making art. But there’s something about it that gives artist a creative freedom to print in bulk. It’s not like your standard copy machine where it prints colors all at once. You have to manually take out the one ink drum and put in another one. It mimics a lot of qualities of screenprinting but it’s strictly for paper. You kinda should make sure you’re educated in the color wheel before taking on riso, especially when colors overlap. It’s pretty darn cool in that sense.

So for the crash course, I made prints of one design – that L7 poster I made a couple of years ago. I wanted multiple colors, so I turned the image into a CMYK print. I separated the channels in Photoshop and printed bitmaps of all four CMYK channels.

We learned that the registration will always be a little wonky. We were also told to embrace the mistakes. I’m all about embracing wonky, so I can handle that.

The only downside to rise printing is the paper wastage. It’s a bit excessive, but you need to kinda wake the ink up after switching the ink drum, and then you gotta test the registration to make sure each color overlays the way you want it to. So you gotta make copy after copy.

But besides that, this printing method has grown on me and I plan on signing up for a membership to use the machine. I got so many ideas I want to follow through with and this seems like the year to do so! I’m so excited.