Watching: Crash (1996) by David Cronenberg
Reading: The Jellyfish by Boum
Listening to: Tumbling Ground by The Hated
Working on: finishing the graphic novel pitch, sketching and painting and drawing, writing, losing my mind
A few years ago I took an intro to risograph printing class at SVA. For those who don’t know, risograph printing is like if you could do screen printing with a photocopier. You load drums of single colours of ink, and the machine burns a master stencil using your greyscale drawing/photo as a guide. When you run the paper through, it pushes the ink through this stencil. Riso ink is somewhat transparent, so you can layer and blend colours and make nice gradients. It’s just technical enough to be very interesting, but still has the fascination of unpredictability and experimentation.
Riso machines only read black/white, so you set up each colour in greyscale. 100% black prints the colour at 100%, 50% is half strength, and white areas tell it not to print the colour here at all. I set mine up digitally and use clipping masks to approximate the colours, although they’re never totally accurate.
When I got lab time at SVA, I printed books and did some single prints and experimentation. Book production was cost-effective and interesting and fun, but it took so long to do it, and then to assemble 1700 books. I don’t get a lot of free time and I want to draw, and now it’s really hard to get lab time at SVA anyway.
I love drawing on toned surfaces, and riso uses matte papers and has a matte finish, and I wondered if you could paint on top of it – or at least draw in ink. Teal and fluorescent pink are a great combination for a retro vaporware look, so I played around with various video grain textures and warp effects to make glitch/noise textures, printed them on 90lb vellum bristol to try out. I didn’t print them at 100%, I dropped it down to about 50% to 70% opacity so they didn’t overpower the drawing. I printed a lot.
I’m sure other people draw over the top of riso prints, but I haven’t seen anyone doing this kind of thing.
I typically use:
Black waterproof shellac ink
Ice green and pink acrylic gouache (I want the matte finish)
Matte white acrylic paint, either out of a paint marker or a bottle
Gel pens in white, pink, and teal
A brush or 512 nib
A USB “lightbox” to transfer the sketch
The lightbox is important because you cannot erase pencil on the riso-printed surface: it will remove the riso ink. So, you either want to be really confident and work straight in ink, or prepare a drawing to trace. I usually do a digital sketch and print it.
Do the inks.
Touch up the details, fill in the blacks.
Paint time! And gel pen details! Outline the whole guy with white gel pen or thin paint marker.
It’s not a complex process once you’ve got the print made. I made myself a giant stack of them and have discovered that some designs work better than others for drawing on.
Notes
I haven’t had great success with washes or very wet media like watercolour/designer gouache. I might experiment with it more, but it has mostly looked muddy.
I used this font.
I use this directory to get hex codes for ink colours.
You cannot scan fluorescents with a normal scanner, they will come out beige/grey, because that’s what they actually look like – our eyes interpret them differently. You need a CCD scanner that uses the same kind of light that activates the colours for our eyes. I invested in one because I work in photoactive paint and ink a lot, but the smallest size they come in is A3, they are fucking giant compared to the normal flatbeds, and they are not cheap. Even the cheapest model (mine) is amazing for scanning artwork so I use it all the time, but if you don’t have access to one of these, consider sticking to regular colours.