I was back at Rope Press for the final day of my printing journey of self discovery and armed with a serious to-do list. On Wednesday I learned how to separate the colour channels of a photograph into CMYK layers and Riso print it in 4 colours with some amazing results. I wanted to try this process out again but using a more colourful image and was also keen to test whether using a painted image instead of a photograph would work. We separated the layers of the file the same way as we did for the photograph and printed a blue and black layer first and then a yellow and red layer before layering all four colours onto the same sheet. The first time we tried this the image came out a bit too orange but Reece has a lot of CMYK printing experience so was able to tweak the levels of ink in each layer to get an overall image that resembled the original more closely. By the end of the trial and error process I had a print which had the most colours I had ever seen in a Riso print and was so pleased and surprised at how the painting had translated into a Riso print. Printing full colour illustrations without preparing separate layers in the original artwork was something I had never considered.
I also wanted to try to print some artwork I had pre-prepared as 3 layers for 3 colour printing without separating the colour channels. I knew this would have a much more ‘blocky’ effect since all of the layers were selected and cropped by me and not filtered in Indesign, I thought this was the way that I was most likely to work when I got back to Rabbits Road Press so wanted to take advantage of the fact that Rope Press have ‘yellow’ and see how it would print in pink, yellow and blue in a more straight forward way. I liked the image it produced even though it looked messier than the previous technique. It would require a lot more skill and practice on my part when preparing the artwork to achieve a more thoughtful range of colour blends and textures but it resembled something that looked a lot more like it had gone through a print making process and it was easier to decode how the colours had been achieved.
Last but definitely not least, I used the session as an opportunity to try out some ideas I had for patterns which I could use on notebook covers later. I preprepared the layers using paper, glue, scissors, card and ink and would use the scanning bed instead of a computer to scan in the layers. This was meant to be the most straight forward thing I would do all week but the incredible colour range at Rope Press made it difficult to decide on a colour scheme. With some advice from Reece and a few weird colour combinations I decided that these would resemble the freckled effect I was going for. I brought my own card so I could print a batch and will be turning hem into sketchbooks/notebooks next week.
Reece was a fabulous and very encouraging teacher, if you’d like to book a private printing session with him or get some work printed by Rope Press, drop them an email.
Many of the things that I made during the residency are available to buy online here or IRL at The Corner Shop.
You can find out more about Risograph printing and make your own prints in London at Rabbits Road Press every Wednesday during term time or sign-up for the Summer Riso Residency week.
