I attended a two-session Risograph Printing Workshop by Knuckles & Notch as part of the library’s annual youth arts festival, PRESSPLAY. I lucked out snagging a seat because of a last-minute cancellation. It had been a while since I last drew anything, and wow did it take effort to tamp down on the cursing that was raging in my head at how tedious drawing is.
Anyway, I drew some mermaids.
The first session was held at library@orchard, where the faces behind Knuckles & Notch, Djohan and Marilyn, showed us their selection of Risograph prints, how the machine worked, and how we were to separate our drawings into layers in order to print the final product – with our two-colour print project for this workshop, we only had to work with two layers.This was my first layer, which I’d choose the colour teal for. The actual colours used on our layers didn’t matter, and only served to create values in the printed copy. e.g. the lighter yellows were used to make sure that the teal would be of a lesser intensity in the print.I chose fluorescent pink for my second layer to act as accents, because it’s not everyday you get to play with fluorescent inks.These were my two layers combined.
This was the machine in action – the printing was incredibly fast! It worked by scanning in the first layer using the photocopying tray at the top of the machine. The machine creates a template on the surface of the teal drum (which gets discarded into a tray inside the machine after).
Once it spits out the required number of copies, the drum is replaced with the fluorescent pink drum, the second layer photocopied onto the template, and the printed pieces are re-fed into the machine for the second colour. Minor adjustments have to be made to line the prints up, so lots of test prints happened.The Knuckles & Notch studio.Look at all the colours offered!Fluorescent orange was used in the background for another participant’s work.It was time to score and fold our eight-page zine from the A3 paper we had worked on.Final pieces and a test print of the teal layer which also turned out exceptionally nice.
