June's print headed out this weekend! And I'm almost done drawing July and August's prints. (Patreon)

Hey everyone, here's the final print I've been working on for June's patron subscribers! Anyone who signed up before June 1st will be receiving this print, which I'll be hiring a 'quarantine circle' friend to help ship out this weekend! I'm also including an additional little print for all your patience. Thank you for sticking with me while I navigate my new animation job and coronavirus struggles!

This print changed a lot between the digital coloring and actual printing. It went through 3 different major changes, which you can see in the second to last uploaded photo with the three top images. This was printed in blue, fluorescent pink and yellow ink in that order. The original print colors were very muted (far left), so I pumped up the contrast of the print by adding more pink in her hair, which made her much more of the focal point in the print, but it took one iteration in between the original and the final to get right. I made some values clearer so you can see the lizard/frog genie has opened his own pot lid, although I'm still not sure it's an important part of the piece that's noticed, but it makes the story make just a little more sense. 

You can see in the transition photo (with all my wasted master shame) I also slowly made the background brighter as well, so that fluorescent pink would really pop in front of the yellow. Most of the print stayed the same, though! I really loved the muted/desaturated cool colors in the pots and the lizard genies. That's what I'm officially calling them now, haha, even though they're also very frog like! In this world they control the best tea leaves. Our protagonist is on a quest for the best one, but she has to enter the bog of kettles to request it of the genies. 

File set up was the same for this as the other more recent prints have been! One group for each color with a variety of editable opacities inside. I've been printing colors 24 hours apart to minimize the roller marks but the blue is still being picked up by the rollers pretty heavily. That's not something I'm used to with the two drum MZ machines so I have to be extra patient with this single drum RP Riso, printing my final colors 24 hours apart (not something I do when testing values, however). Luckily my local technician came out and fixed up the computer drivers for me so I can now either print directly from my Mac via Preview with a USB cord or I can print with an ethernet cable plugged into the machine and it's ~*~*wireless*~*~! Which is actually much faster than printing from the USB cable for some reason. My computer tends to forget it's plugged in? Or it might be the Riso being sensitive to the speed of the cord. For some reason Ethernet cable has been a superior priniting method so far. Hope this info helps! Let me know if you have any questions!

-Natalie