The Little Mermaid ~ April's Riso Subscription Print (Patreon)

April's prints are finally finished, after a lot of fuss and broken Riso time! This Little Mermaid print is headed out to patrons who paid on April 1st! Keep an eye out for shipping emails- and please let me know if you've moved since April!

This one is inspired by my trip to Copenhagen (And Stockholm for the Vasa Museum!) and reading up on Hans Christian Andersen stories. Andersen was from Copenhagen and apparently inspired by the city's bay to write The Little Mermaid about a young mer-teen who falls in love with the world above the water...then in love with a prince who can't swim! In this print I wanted to show a young mermaid dreaming of the world above, and also using a little bit of her siren magic to entice the ships to come closer so they might spill their interesting goods and humans out into her domain. She's friends with all creatures under the sea, but longs to understand the creatures and cities above the tides. She makes a deal with a sea witch and finally gets her wish to be among the humans.

This will be my first in a series of classic fairytales prints. Now that I have a sleeping beauty print and a little mermaid print, I thought I'd make it a formal series all on it's own. I'm hoping to jump into some non-traditional fairytales too- lots of research to do!

For June I'll be working on another adjacent story series- a Classic Literature series- next to this Fairytale series. I'm splitting these series in two that were originally one storytelling series. I think it's best to keep the names simpler but will work on both simultaneously. So June's print will be Robin Hood! Excited to share more soon!

Here's a sneak peek of my inspiration board for June's Robin Hood print:  

Lots of N.C. Wyeth in this one, inspiration that I think will stick across this series.

Back to The Little Mermaid, though!

I'll start with my inspiration board made for this print!

This one features lots of Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson, and other turn of the century to golden age illustrators.

Printing of The Little Mermaid

This print was a difficult one to nail down. My color mock up looked nothing like what came out of the machine, so I had to double the yellow group layer and double the pink group layer as well. Something about mid-tones are difficult for my Riso to read, so I have to enhance them to match the values I'm expecting from my mock up.

This print took 6 tries to match my original mock up.

Here, I've made a little diagram describing why I had to go through so many edits on my Riso. Basically I was trying to chase a color mock-up that was completely off from what the Riso had actuallyprinted!

I could lament about the editing process on my Riso all day lmao. I'll end it with- now I always double at LEAST my pink layers, double my line art layer and soften the blue group layer to 80% opacity before sending them to print. That gives me a better jumping off point for editing later.

I love how the Riso blue ended up making really subtle greens in this print! all these little dots are what Riso does when it can't really understand how light the opacity of the ink color is. So these dots represent like 1 15% or less (probably 10%) value of blue. The line art is a combination of 100% and 80% since I'm using a pencil brush that has variation of values dependent on the pressure. for example, the lines in her see-through seaweed top. Love also seeing the gradient in blue at the top of this image and how the blue dots are slowly added. That's the guts of Riso! Just a bunch of little dots :3

here are more juicy close ups! I'm realizing castle on the hill has been repeated a few times in my prints...but it just really gives me classic fairytale vibes and I don't think I can give them up just yet...but I'm looking for ways to keep them fresh! I made sure to give this castle and the underwater castle very different shape language, even though I wanted that connection between humans and mermaids.

I really love how all the little sea creatures and fish came out. I wanted some unique little critters, but also wanted them to blend into the background to be hunted for and found.

Vasa Museum inspiration

This ship! This was one of the most challenging parts of the print, of course! I drew on my research from visiting the Vasa Museum in Sweden, and it really helped me understand each part of the boat!! Endlessly thankful for the experience to visit this museum. If you get a chance to visit Stockholm DO NOT miss the Vasa museum!!

The entire room was filled with a ship that has been underwater since 1628! It was brought up in the 50's and painstakingly preserved so we can see what a top of the line ship would have looked like in the 17th century (and so I could put it in a little mermaid print hahaha).

I tried to take some screenshots of videos I took, because just one image was hard to show the magnitude of the boat.

They also had a mini boat showing the difference between the old ship that'd been underwater for 300 years and what it would have looked like brand new!

I also wanted to add a few ships that had seen better days, similar to the Vasa ship.

Riso Breakdown

One last note on the process of this print- I chose to take away some of the water to create more contrast and I think it looks really cool as completely blank space where I originally intended there to be water! Playing with this negative space is one of my favorite things about printmaking.

Couldn't finish a mermaid print without adding a little sunken treasure :3

here's the full breakdown of my process! It's attached at a document on this post as well if this is too small:

Basically these breakdowns share an idea of what colors I'm working with layer by layer and how the Riso reads them- which is only in black and white- or in positive and negative space!

Thank you for reading!! Let me know if you have any questions in the comments ^_^

xoxo nat

P.S. Open Studio this friday - Address Update!!!!

ALSO I totally added the wrong address for my studio it's in fact 3191 Casitas Ave. Los Angeles 90041. Atwater Village! There's apparently also an address like this in pasadena...don't go there!!