By this time, I’ve pretty much got to the point that I felt like I paid my Riso dues – got my chops, gave my pint of blood, traded my soul to Satan, however you like to characterize the process. It is clear to me that this beast is like no other printing process I’ve ever worked with, and that includes offset, silkscreen, litho, etching, inkjet, laser… It has a culture and mystique all its own, not to mention the look and feel of the prints and process. It even has its own Evil Villain – RisoSource, AKA David Interdonati.
I took some random files and started trying to figure out how to separate them into “plates”. The Riso uses printed black-and-white sheets, placed on what looks like a copier platen, to make each screen (“master”), so if you want to print red, you make a black and white that makes the red master. Here are a couple of things I messed with – a poster I’d printed on the Epson a while back:
,…and an exercise in photo treatments:
For example, here is the yellow art for the flatiron photo – black prints yellow:
I had a couple of pretty practical projects I wanted to get done, and was planning on just ordering them online, but the Riso changed that – business cards and a new brochure for the shop. I talked to Jennifer Adler of Survival by Design and she was really excited about working with this thing, and we got to work. She sent this over and I ran it up:
…a really cool mix of Riso printing and typography – not too far from letterpress. In the process I remembered a technique I learned all of 30 years ago in the 4C stripping department at Eusey Press- how to lay out a “work and turn”. (By laying it out with both the front and the back on the sheet, backed up on the center line, you only have to make one plate instead of two, and when you turn the paper over, it backs up correctly… )
With the tests and cards behind us, it was time to start on the big project, the brochure. This was a simple tri-fold piece that we needed to update, and as Jennifer said, a makerspace should make their own brochure, right?
I’d learned a few things, beyond keeping this printer running happily. The inks are very transparent – so when you lay down the yellow and put the red over it, you get a nice orange. We’ve got yellow, black, green and red, so the colors are fairly basic. Also, the ink takes a while to dry – it actually doesn’t dry, per se, it absorbs into the stock, and takes its time to do so.
That means a couple of things – you have to run a nice, uncoated paper like watercolor or a printmaking paper. We went back and forth to the art store and tried a bunch of stock, and settled on Mohawk Superfine Eggshell Ultrawhite, 80C. (This thing will take some nice card stock, in fact it like it better than a lightweight paper…). Using copier paper is a hit-or-miss, as it’s both coated, and very lightweight. It also means that you have to give the thing some time between color runs or you’ll smear the ink, track it on the rollers and get it all over places inside the printer you don’t want it to be.
I also learned that it makes a slight difference in what order you lay the colors down. If you print red over yellow, it will favor the red a bit, for example. Generally, though, you want to lay the colors down by coverage – put down the lighter coverage colors first, then the heavier last, just because of the fact the paper gets soft as it gets wet with ink. This creates all sorts of funny feed problems.
Probably the best advice to anyone going down the Riso road is in the first chapter of the Guide to Risography:
“RISO IN A NUTSHELL: 01. Take your time.”
Chapter 4: Designing and Printing the Brochure is up next!
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