'Into The Crooked Forest', June's Riso Subscription Print and Breakdown (Patreon)

Finally, after lots of back and forth in the printing stage, June's print is finished! This is a three color print in blue, pink and fluorescent yellow. I was going to try fluorescent orange instead with this one but I really liked how the pink came out instead! These are shipping out this sunday to all my June risograph print subscribers (that's anyone who signed up before June 1st). I'm almost caught up- July's print is ready for riso and August's print is in the works! Thank you again for your patience while I get caught up and make each print the best it can be. 

This one was really fun to make, the looseness of it made it feel really fresh and the characters ended up being so close to my heart when I finished! This is really just fan art of Lord of the Rings, but if the fellowship had been all women and girls and non binary characters- and goblins and stranger creatures than just elves and dwarves and hobbits! Lemony-onion headed bubs! I had fun. 

I added my digital version of the piece above, too. I wish Riso could do vibrant light blues and greens like my digital mock-up, but alas, I only have regular blue ink, not cornflower, which would probably get me close!

Here's my process with this piece! I finished this one in photoshop on a Wacom cintiq. 

First, I like to start with very messy lines, finding the image as I draw. 

Then I draw the line art and change the color to the blue I plan to print in. 

After that I'll add my flats. Flats are shapes or large blocks of color that I can reference later when I'm doing my complicated Riso coloring. Usually they're random colors because you're trying to use as little brain energy on this stage as possible. On this piece I knew I wanted greens and blues so this also acted as a color mock up as well. It's always sad doing a color mock-up in RGB, though, because the riso colors can never quite replicate the RGB color. I try to avoid this because I always mourn how much darker the Riso is when it comes out. 

Flat process: The way I flat is by choosing the magic wand tool - clicking an area with closed lines (with contiguous and sample all layers ON, and the area must have closed lines, either closed by color or closed by line art) - using an action I created with 'Expand (by 4 pixels (I've found 4 pixels is a nice expansion so it touches the other colors under the line art- making sure color goes entirely under line art is a MUST for Riso because when the registration is inevitably misaligned you won't have white lines showing where you don't want them)) and Fill (with foreground color). So again that's Expand (by 4 pixels) and Fill (with foreground color) but I created an action for it so I don't have to go through the menu and do it every time I want to block in a color shape, I just click F6 which is the key I decided was best for me. And then I choose the next closed line shape with my magic wand tool and use the action again, but this time with another color! I try to use different colors for different areas that I want to reference later while not having to grab a bunch of the same shapes. This saves a considerable amount of time later while coloring! 

Once I'm done flatting I turn the opacity of the line art to 50% and make sure all my color shapes touch and overlap the line where I want it to. I marked some problem areas I'll want to color in. 

After that I add in my 'extra' line art. Basically all the scribbley stuff that would be a nightmare to flat if I had it all on one layer.

This is what it looks like without the first line art layer! Pretty cool!! You can see below in the tree leaves where I forgot to fully color behind the lines, but they were so small it wasn't really a problem. Sometimes it's not going to be perfect!

Next, while my flats layer is selected but NOT turned on (without the eye), I use the magic wand tool (with select all layers turned OFF) and select my perfectly flatted shapes of color and then create a new layer under my 'Blue' group. I then change that layer to 'multiply' and to 25% opacity. I then use the bucket tool to drop in ONLY blue into this layer (with my selection still on)! Now I have a few of my selected trees colored with blue in 25% opacity. (not shown are all my insane opacity layers that I actually end up with at the end of the piece- but at first I use 25, 50,75 and 100% opacities to get things started and keep them manageable before they get nuts). 

After this I add a new group layer called 'yellow' and add only yellow to all the layers in this group. I do the same thing I did with the blue group layers and select my trees again in the flats layer (but while it's turned off). I bucket tool the selection with yellow and I have my first green!

After that I do the same thing but with a pink layer! 

This is how I get such complicated layering and colors! I just add and take away and change the opacity of layers until I like the colors. Like you can see in all the screenshots I thought I would use orange (or, fluorescent orange because that's the ink I have) but when I went to print it I decided to use my old favorite fluo pink instead. 

After I color my entire piece I then have a mock up of what it will mostly look like in the final printed version! (unless I change things after printing, which I always do, so that's why this doesn't quite look like the final printed piece here). 

After I'm happy with the colored mock-up I duplicate the entire thing (by putting them all in one group), turn off the colored group, change the copy to 'black and white' or bw for short, and then go down layer by layer using an action I made to turn the 'lightness' down to -100 on each layer. You can see my action below in the actions window. It's basically command U (for hue and saturation) and turn lightness down -100 (not touching anything else). 

After this I duplicate my line art (because Riso has a hard time reading my light line art- I have to make it extra dark for the lines to come out clean and strong) and then I save each group as a Jpeg (blue jpeg, pink jpeg and yellow jpeg). I do this because I print one ink at a time through the Preview app on Mac. 

Don't forget to turn the line art off for your other colors! Or else there will be a pink line art and a yellow line art that won't look clean when you print the final piece! I also like to add a 'white' layer sometimes to affect all the layers below it. That white layer has little white dots on it that I want to go below the line art but above all the colors because it's on the rocks and roots! Here's the color breakdown:

Each of these images is what I send to the printer for each color drum. I have to change the 'drums' out of the machine each time I want to print a new color. It's not like digital printing! Drums are large cylinders of ink that I have to physically put in and take out of the machine. Like this!:

Minus the spiders and bugs, of course ^_^

So I print each color to see if the colors work- and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't and I really hate them! That means I have to go back to the photoshop file and change up some black and white values to make certain colors work with riso ink. This is where the flats layer REALLY comes in handy. I can select certain shapes (without grabbing a gradient or something special I did while coloring) and delete them in certain ink layers or add to them. Below is an example of four different color experiments I did before I landed on my final print. This means I used 12 masters (the screens in the machine) to make these four prints, and I changed values slightly in each one, having to make 'Blue2', 'blue3' and 'blue4' jpegs. Naming them is helpful so I can always go back to an earlier version if I over did it, which I do all the time!

I hated the pink in the trees and wanted to keep the soft greens I had in my original RGB mock-up. So I ended on this!: 

Hope you like it! I really enjoyed how this one came out. This was also created for the Giant Robot exhibition 'Deep Forest' which opens today out here in Los Angeles! I'm so glad Giant Robot has been asking me to make prints for their shows, it's been a great way to come up with new concepts and be part of my community out here a little more, since I really haven't had any of that since we moved here right before Covid hit!

Again, these will be shipping out Sunday! Excited for you to get them!

xx
Natalie