Little Lily Home - September's Riso Subscription Print (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I'm all finished with September's Riso subscription print and will be sending it out tomorrow! This is a 3 color print in blue, fluorescent pink and yellow on 8 1/2 x 11" natural white 65lb. paper.

I made this piece the night of the US election, on November 3rd. After what felt like a nightmare of a week I just wanted to make a sweet piece with fairies and little fairy creatures. There's not much to this one, only representing a space of safety and belonging when things are rough.

This one took a bit of a journey with the colors, I ended up changing the values a LOT on this piece to get them just right. I also changed the actual line art halfway through because the rollers were grabbing a part of the image that had a character’s face on it so I had to change the character completely, moving the direction of the character to a side where the roller marks wouldn’t hit. I've added a few photos so you can see each iteration of this print!

Each time I print I always have to change values slightly, but this print was especially bad. The dragon totally changed, which I think was ultimately a good thing, I liked that the demons/creatures were pretty simple in this print and wanted to keep them consistent, the dragon was just a little too detailed. I probably wasted 12~ masters with all the changes. I'm also finding I have to make a new master on my dry drums if I wait a day to print colors. I usually make all the masters at once because I’m testing the values and then slowly print each color without changing the masters, but now that the humidity has been lower than 10% in Los Angeles I have to remake masters that have dried out no matter how many prints I run to get them unclogged. I thought this lack of humidity would help minimize the roller marks but it’s only made the masters dry out, really. No benefits so far!

The roller marks have really been a struggle with this single drum machine, I’m making a big order for 11x17 paper so I can start printing on larger sheets and leave large areas blank for the roller marks to hit, then use the extra paper for smaller, silly projects. This means a lot more cutting work but it could really save me a lot of pain and struggle with the roller marks. I try to erase them now but they still effect the image a bit. On the flip side my registration has gotten a lot better, I’m losing less than 1/3 of the prints now to misregistration, which is exciting! Basically, I’m just making a new master if the registration is significantly off, sometimes the skew only happens on one master.

I’m just going through masters like crazy at this point, anything to get a solid final image. I’ve noticed the amount of paper I have in the tray also effects the registration changes while printing. If I keep the printer tray generally half full and higher then I notice more consistent registration throughout printing. When it dips close to or below 1/3 full then I start to get irregular registration that moves the printed color up and down on the paper, not side to side, which I think is interesting. It just goes to show that grabbing the paper is a significant part of the machine printing straight. Of course, I always make sure my paper is flush before printing any part of the image as any irregularities in the paper going in means changes in later printing too.

Hope these printing thoughts help any printers out there!

Best,
Natalie