Although I work as a riso printer, I’ve not actually spent much of any time exploring colour mixing / layering myself. I’ve been working on our new website this past year, and trying to come up with illustrations to easily and clearly explain riso printing. It has been really fun and exciting, and also completely frustrating and draining. I have so much to learn about design in general, and it’s sometimes really hard for me to accept that. Having always been ‘good at art’ and generally quite good at drawing, to find that I actually struggle to place the image, or how to colour something so that it’s attractive/appealing/easily legible – that feels really hard.
This little drawing is something I came up with a couple of weeks ago and left sitting on my desk for some time. Maybe I don’t need to explain it but here I go anyway. It’s supposed to suggest inspiration and creativity that is possible with riso printing, without giving like a precise example of “70% opacity blue w. 65% opacity pink”. Just a quick little image to give a glimpse of what happens with colour overlay.
At Footprint, we’re a member of Radical Routes, a UK wide network of housing co-ops, workers co-ops and social centres. We print the quarterly internal newsletter, Rumours, a little A5 zine of updates from the different member co-ops in the network. This time I needed to quickly come up with a cover last minute, so decided to use this opportunity to try out this idea I’d had for the riso website.
At this concentration / opacity / level of contrast, the riso inks simply came out too thick to mix well! So I lightened a few elements, re-exported and decided to go for the tried and tested prettiness of blue & fluoro pink layering:
Since then I’ve been having trouble trying to scan / photograph it to use for the website! I wasn’t anticipating so many issues at all and have some new found respect for people working with riso (I already had some but not enough!). One problem of MANY is figuring out how different screens display colours. I edited the image below on our work computer, and to me, the colours looked somewhat close to true to life; but on this monitor on my own computer – the colours are seriously washed out! When I view it on my phone it looks pixelated as anything as well.
So, back to more practice and trial and lots of error! It’s particularly painful to have lots of errors in riso printing, especially when I’m trying to just make one image to put on a website. It’s such a wasteful thing to be at, so I may have to forget about this little dream and just keep going with the other designs elements I’ve been a bit stuck on for a while.
One artist I follow on insta whose colour mixes are something to behold, is Natalie Andrewson. I’m seriously impressed by the skillful and practiced layering, as well as the actual illustrations themselves.
