Mangrove Wanderers - November’s Riso print breakdown (Patreon)

Hello! November Riso subscription packages went out early December- so if you paid Nov 1st you should have already received it! This package came with a few extra goodies this time! It includes my new print 'Mangrove Wanderers' print (in blue, fluorescent orange and yellow Risograph ink), a little bookmark and a fairy mice sticker as an extra thank you. 

I wanted to make this print a little messier and looser than the prints I’ve been making lately. I’ve been looking back on my ‘Hey Hey Los Angeles’ print that I just reprinted larger and the ‘Farewell Goodnight’ print I’m hoping to reprint soon, which are both very ‘messy’ prints by my standards lately. I’ve been seesawing between creating fun, loose and energetic prints and creating prints that focus on line and keeping colors strictly within the line (like the dragon prints and On the mountain garden trail print). 

I spent a lot of time last year looking through all my prints when I was getting ready for comic conventions and small press fairs, and I was surprised by how much my Riso work has changed since I began working in it. When I was sitting behind my booth or setting up my display I would stop and try to figure out why I had made certain choices in Riso layering. Usually it was to mask my bad registration or that I just didn't know how to layer values on top of each other or was being too precious in my paper and time. I hadn't had much room to experiment then, I couldn't afford to waste paper if I didn't like a color or had bad registration. I also wasn’t as aware of best practices for Riso then, but with each print I learned so much more and got better in my registration, trying to get the best out of Riso, and myself, that I could and I feel I might have lost some of that looseness in my work as a result. So I’m looking back at them now to see how I can incorporate some of that liveliness and color spontaneity in my prints going forward.

I started this print with sketches from my iPad in procreate- I’ve been doing this more! Whole character explorations and plans for compositions are sketched in procreate sometimes, even though my favorite remains photoshop (but really just because I'm used to it). I left enough room in these sketches to be more like concept designs, so I can draw from it while I'm making the final piece and let it be more of a fluid final. Usually I start with a sketch and just draw directly over it. This time I kept the sketch to the side while I recreated it on a blank canvas.

When I started on the final I began with the line art of the mangrove branches, then the scratchy background. I was also inspired by the Magical Orange Tree print that i also just reprinted larger- I loved how the fluorescent orange and light blue made a nice soft purple together. 

I waited a long time to add in the characters, they mostly stayed empty spaces in the image until the end, as I figured out exactly what shapes I wanted them to be. I was inspired by some of the character designs I’d made but wasn’t satisfied with them for this image. They always sort of take shape when I’m working out the piece so they can play off of each other and look good as a group.

When I started printing I went through 4 iterations of the print- the first values ended up being much darker than I’d intended so I reprinted them a bit lighter, but that was too light, and also way too green. I softened the blue and doubled the fluorescent orange but still didn’t like how green the image was, so I turned the yellow values down and ended up with this softer blue piece as the final! I was originally taking values directly from the Magical Orange Tree print but it just didn’t work out with this print and wasn’t what I was actually looking for. I finally ended up with a blue that wasn't too dominant and yellow that was much softer than I'd made originally. The above values are the final values I sent to the machine. 

That's it! Let me know if you have any questions. I'm planning to add this one to my shop tomorrow if you didn't get a chance to sign up in time for November's patreon package! December's print is almost finished, and January's is coming soon!! Thank you!

xx Nat