July's Risograph Subscription Print! (Patreon)

Hey everyone,
I just finished July's print and I'm excited to share a breakdown with you! First, here are a few juicy shots of the final print with some thoughts on color. 

I've been wanting to make a mermaid print for a while so I decided to 'dive in' with this half narrative/half decorative image! I'm so sorry for that terrible pun, here's another shot to make up for it: 

I decided to mix up the colors for this print, printing in Cornflower Blue, Pink and Orange to really pop those pinks right off the paper. I wanted to even out the insanely bright pink vines with some neutral tones and found that mixing light oranges and CF blues created possibly my favorite brown combinations. Cornflower blue has some white mixed into the ink so it's a lot more opaque and cooler than the basic Riso 'Bright Blue' ink, which is what I normally use. That means my darkest color is much more subtle/soft than I'm used to but creating richer middle tones that I'm happy to obsess over. 

The pink and orange combo is soooo vibrant, I can't capture it in photos, which is a bummer. but this is close enough. It's really hard to replicate Riso in photo form, I try to be as true to the print as possible when editing but some colors just don't replicate well. The purples and browns in the rocks are replicating really well, though, and I'm so happy with how they turned out. I especially like them next to the white dots I added last minute. Those are just mouse drawn spots (I didn't have my tablet while printing) on a layer above all my ink layers in photoshop so every layer of ink has the dots in the same place. You can usually see hints of each color I used surrounding the dots because I can never get the registration thaaaattt perfect.

I really like how the yellow paper can pump a lot of the warmer tones and add some depth where I don't have ink. It also harmonizes all the colors as if I was adding a filter on top of my piece. Sometimes I'm so all over the place with my colors and the toned paper really saves the piece-or helps me realize where I need to edit values and let the yellow paper shine all on it's own. 

I also really like the way solid cornflower blue looks with light pink and orange overlaid on top of it. The fish decorating the top of the vines were really where I indulged in that cornflower. I want to make a piece in the future that's just a bunch of large solid cornflower blue shapes mixed with pink and orange to make that rich warm purple you see in the girl's pants. I've really liked purples in place of blacks lately, I usually have to mix a few colors to get a soft purple that I like and the textures from the Riso screen really pop when I mix more than 2 colors so it's a win for texture and saturation. 

I thought this would be a fun piece but I was actually really stressed out about it because I hadn't made a cheat sheet for myself for these colors! I've been relying on the blue/yellow/pink cheat sheet so much lately that when I went to these colors I totally froze! 

A big part of my process is editing values after seeing them fully printed and using inks I'm not as familiar with meant I went through many more masters than I'm used to using while testing. Here is the first pass I did from my original file:

It was originally WAY more blue and more of a nighttime scene, I guess. But I decided I didn't like it while I was printing, and not really what I had intended for the print originally either. Although now, looking back at it, I do like the nighttime feel. With every edit I try to also add a little more color into the print. Full disclosure, I went through 12~ masters/screens for this image. Which means I changed each ink screen 4 times to get my final image seen above. 

I know not everyone has this ability to test the values a few times but it's been a huge part of learning what combos work and what don't for me- and mostly...just what I like as a printer. Risograph printers/publishers will only usually allow for one or two edits to colors if you're commissioning a print but finding a workshop to print yourself or asking for additional edits up front might be the best way to get prints the way you intended them. Or didn't intend them! Sometimes you need that first pass to be like 'no I have to change it all.' and that's totally ok and part of the process, as long as youre in for the time and the money it might cost without owning your own machine. For this print I completely changed the way my final looked and realized things about the combinations of values I could only see when the image was fully printed. You can avoid this a bit if you use a toned canvas when you're mocking up the colors and the Pantone/HEX/RGB/CMYK numbers for each color. Here's a good resource for the closest numbers, and general great site for Riso knowledge! Still, sometimes colors print together in a way that's unanticipated. 

Here are a few shots of the orange and pink layers with the cornflower blue! I changed the order that I printed in once on accident and it really does change the look of the final print. Printing pink first made the print a lot more pink than orange/much cooler and printing orange first made the opposite effect-more warm! That's because the first color printed seeps into the paper first and any color on top of it doesn't seep in as much. The first colors printed are usually darker and more overpowering than the rest of the colors! 

Here's a shot of each layer of color as I printed them: from left to right is Cornflower Blue, Orange and Pink. If you zoom in you'll be able to see my layer order and opacity level for the layer! These layers are crazier than normal, but generally how I set up my files when I first start is a group for each ink color I'll be using and then 4 layers in each group of 4 different opacities of 25%. so for example, I have a Pink- group with 4 layer: 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% opacities. I make my piece in color, copy the color group and then turn the saturation down on each layer to keep it's opacity of grey. Hope this helps!!!!!

Thanks for your patience again with this print. These are coming out later in the month than I want them to but August's print is almost finished so that one should be coming out on time this month! This print is also arriving with two small bird prints as an extra thank you! Here's an image of those- they won't be in my shop for sale but I'll add them to large orders periodically, so they're special :)

Thanks for reading, hope this is useful! Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

<3
Natalie