Last Thursday evening I had the pleasure of joining a two-colour riso print workshop at Ditto Press, an independent publisher and printer here in East London that specializes in risograhphs. The risograph printer is a nifty machine, manufactured by Riso, that looks like a photocopier and works like an automatic screen printer or stencil machine. It’s cheap, fast and Riso offers amazing colours (like gold and fluorescent orange).
Ditto Press has just moved to a new location and now offers workshops in their brand new gallery slash shop slash print studio. It was a great evening. Ditto co-founder Ben told us about the ins and outs of riso printing. The class was small and it was really interesting to see my fellow workshoppers at work; we all had different approaches and end results. Because we were making the prints manually (no Photoshop!) in two separate layers it was pretty difficult to visualize the outcome. There were some happy (and less happy..) accidents and unforeseen effects, but I liked the unpredictability of it. I’m so used to having total control in Photoshop and it’s easy to loose some of the initial spontaneity by making it all too perfect. In the end I was pretty pleased with the result and will definitely be using this printing technique in the future.
I got a generous amount of copies of my (vintage African barber shop signs-inspired) print, which are available from my Etsy shop. They’re just £5 so grab yourself a bargain!
^ Ben at the machine – about to make a film of the yellow layer.
^ Tada!
