Wild River Girl Print Breakdown (Patreon)

Hey Riso subscribers :) I hope you enjoyed last month's prints. I hope I didn't go too overboard sending you so much stuff last month but I'm finding I'm able to print so much more now so I thought I'd add what I could! Here's how I made that Wild River Girl print--

I originally wanted to try using 6 colors: blue, green, pink, yellow, orange and cornflower blue (a much more opaque blue with white mixed in) but decided I could get what I wanted with just the first four colors and treating them like CMKY. I used the blue as black, green as cyan and yellow for Y and fluorescent pink as magenta. I've been using this color palette a lot more lately and want to try a few more prints in this structure before going extra complicated with 4+ color. I think soon I'll be switching out my altered but still classic CMYK for a few different colors in the same structure. 

Here's a breakdown of the blue and green together (printed at the same time with the duo-drum machine) and the pink and yellow together:

I print two colors at the same time because I can register the two colors really closely, making them read perfectly. Usually you can only do this with one color on a Risograph because the majority of available machines only have a slot for one drum, not two. Usually 3 colors is about the most complicated an artist can get with those machines. That's why I'm trying to produce more complicated images to take advantage of the duo-drum machines the RisoLAB provides. 

So a step by step of this process is:

-make a master, or screen/stencil, of the image on the blue drum (in the first slot)
-then make a master on the green drum (in the second slot)
-then I register them by pressing a button on the machine to move the drums around physically inside the machine to line up the prints perfectly. Because the drums are in slightly different places next to each other they usually need slight tweaking to make the image perfect. I usually move the second drum 1mm horizontally and 1mm vertically to make sure the two different colors line up how I want them to.
-I print about 10 copies of the blue and green print so I can later see how it'll work with the pink and yellow colors.
-After that I switch the blue drum out and replace it with the pink drum and the green drum with the yellow drum. This means the masters for both the blue and green drums remain intact until I instruct the machine to change the master on the drum again. So I can set them aside, test the new two colors (pink and yellow) with the first blue and green prints and then put the green and blue drums back in the machine to continue printing my first prints without redoing/wasting the first masters. Does that make sense? I'm going to make a video of this process with my next print for you to better visualize this process!!
-After I switch out the drums I make a master on the pink drum, then the yellow drum and register them, just like the first step.
-Then I place my 10 first blue and green prints (stacked nicely/flush in the feeding tray) and have the machine print the pink and yellow on top of the blue and green image.
-this usually results in a funky, really off registered image where the pink and yellow are severely shifted from the first image so I eye-ball how many millimeters to move the pink and yellow drums to fit the perfectly registered blue and green drums.
-When I'm done registering those colors I check to see if anything needs tweaking! This is where my new, kind of complicated system comes in that I'll talk about further down. I have to adjust the values of the piece in my file on the computer without actually seeing the color on the screen. Sometimes I'm just deciding 'oh I want my pink to be more vibrant/pop more' so I choose the pink layer and the shape that I want to pop and use the hue/saturation mode to scrub to the value I want on the shape. In this case I'd scrub the shape (her hair, maybe?) to 100% black, rather than say, 75% black.
-After I'm happy with the new color/changes I redo the masters on whichever two color combinations I've effected. So if I fix only the pink values and make a new master on the pink drum I still have to redo the yellow drum's master image because the first pink drum's image leaves a 'ghost' on the second drum's master.
-After all the tweaks using those first 10 prints and master remakes I put the blue and green first drums back! The machine remembers where I moved the drums (the buttons moving 1mm each) so I usually don't have to register the colors again.
-I print the amount of final prints I want in the blue and green. I like to use 65lb Natural White Crest paper.
-Then I switch out the drums again and print the pink and yellow colors on top of the blue and green prints!
-Done!!! Make sure your hands are clean and don't touch the ink directly for a few hours. Riso ink doesn't ever *fully dry* but it especially susceptible to smudging for the first couple of hours. In fact, it's best not to print the second colors (pink and yellow) for a few hours until the first colors set into the paper a bit more. You get a much cleaner print this way! 

Here's my original digital image with the colors I'd imagined for the final: 

I start with just one image, knowing I'll add a copy of it on the bottom. Then I change each layer to a black and white by changing the 'lightness' of the image by changing the hue and saturation adjustment to all the way black. 

Here's the result! 

So my layer system is a little nuts because I want to be totally prepared for tweaks if they have to happen. I just started using this layer system and it miiiigghhhtt be a little ridiculous but I'd rather have it be nuts first and then learn how to scale back rather than the other way around. What I'm doing now is separating every single major shape that has a different color and making it it's own group. The 'girl' group has a bunch of other groups inside of it, housing her spear, skin, hair, shirt and pants. Each of these layers start with all four colors I'm going to use. I'll use the hair as an example!
-first I color and fill the shape of the hair in my *as close as I can get digitally* fluorescent pink. I change it to a multiply layer!
-Then I copy that shape 3 times and fill it with blue, green and yellow and name them respectively.
-Now I can adjust each color until I get the color I want! This way I can change each shape separately when I want to tweak values while printing, which happens often!
-When I print I turn off all other layers except each color layer I'm printing. For example, I keep all pinks visible and send that black and white image to the printer to use as the master on the pink drum!

Here's the final image that I'm working on while printing! I also like to add white layers to the top of my layers list in case there were things I wanted to delete across all layers but was too lazy to change every layer. The top layer is an example of ALL the layers on all together and the bottom layer represents just the blue layers!

That's a wrap! Thanks for reading!