March's Riso Subscription Print! (Patreon)

March’s print is now finished and I’ll be sending it out first thing next week! This piece was printed with three colors- but not the usual three! This time is was blue, fluorescent pink (but only about 60% value) and fluorescent orange (at 100% value)!! I’m really excited about this new color combination because the print is SO vibrant! It’s really hard to capture on my camera but I hope I’ve edited the images above to be able to get a slight feel for just how nuts this fluo orange-pink combo is! And they really pop against the vibrant blue. I was originally considering using federal blue, which is a darker, almost navy blue, but wanted to brighten up some of the combination values with purples that soften parts of the tree where I want the fluorescent colors to pop. Federal blue would have been much more muted and dark, making the purples much darker than I was liking.

You can see above I went through several interactions of this print, just because I wasn’t quite sure how to use the fluorescents wisely with such complicated line art! I started with a much more orange piece than I was pleased with, experimented a little by taking some values out, replacing big blocks of 100% color with a gradient and finding that sometimes turning my star color (fluo pink, which I usually print at 100% so not to lose any of the vibrancy it offers) down to a 50%~ value is the best thing I can do to feature the best in the fluo orange.

One major issue I ran into while printing this piece is that fluorescent pink and orange don’t play well together sometimes. When I add 100% of both colors on top of each other they tend to create a waxy texture on the paper, something I hate!! It only happens after the master on the drum has picked up enough of the pink on the paper that it starts depositing both pink and orange together, instead of just orange. This creates a bizarre texture that looks like melted wax- and honestly I’m just assuming here, I’m not actually 100% sure why this happens sometimes to my most saturated colors!

One more refresher for some new patrons- my Riso pieces are made by a several step/color process that’s achieved by printing one color at a time on the machine. So I printed the blue first, then fluo pink and then fluo orange. When I print I send black and white value ‘maps’ to the printer- basically negative and positive space for the printer to read. I make these value maps by first coloring the piece in photoshop and then turning each layer into a black and white/greyscale image (turning saturation all the way down, not actually changing the mode to greyscale)! So I build the piece in color and then print in black and white because the machine only reads in values! It makes a master with that pos/neg space and pushes ink through the master (like screen printing! Screen = master) to create one color on the page. Then I put that paper with the first color back through the machine to print my second color, then back through the machine again for my third color! The best part about Riso is the layered coloring, which looks like vintage tri-color book printing or a bit like fakey lithograph. It’s deeply satisfying to me to paint with values and explore what values and colors work best with each other (because sometimes it’s a surprise- Riso is strange)!

I made the drawing for this print over the course of a few weeks, slowly adding more creatures and more loopy vines. It was a sort of rest from some of the more intensely dense prints I was working on, and needed a light hearted break between them. When I realized I also really loved these characters I began building it as a print and then had the idea to experiment with fluo pink and orange to compliment what became pretty complicated line art. So purely an experimental piece, all for the love of doodling a good woodsy creature and exploring Riso color.

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

Xoxo natalie