As I promised last time, I set out to make a risograph animation with two colors. I have returned with knowledge!

I finally learned the technique of sending prints from the computer to the riso. And thankfully I did, because the process for doing duo-color printing would have been wayyyyy harder. Details start below 😀 

duo-color in da riso

if you forgot/don’t know what a riso(graph) printer is, check out my last article explaining it!

The riso printer I worked on has two drums, which makes the process a little more convenient. To use both drums on the same print, I first had to separate out the CMYK values on the original sheet for the print colors I chose.

I initially settled on a fluorescent pink and yellow, meaning that I had to make two copies of one sheet of frames: one in magenta, and one in yellow.

The process of printing through the printer is still the same, where a master is made first before printing out the final product. The only difference is having to make two masters with their respective values for each drum (magenta master to pink drum print). After making both masters will it print both on one page.

Ergo:

playing around

Yellow and pink came out wonderful for this duo-color animation. My brain, however, has started to think of other ideas… pondering… The colors are close together on the color wheel and sometimes the little details seem to not pop out as well. What if I switched the yellow out for blue…?

The thing was that I had sunk a TON of hours just into figuring out how to get the two drums to like each other (not to mention a small printing issue with the pink drum).

I did Not feel like printing 16 more pages again with only pink and blue, so I turned to the sheets already available- the extra ones of what was printed.

I had to hope that this little experiment would work out, as the already duo-color print would have to go through the printer again, which left a lot of room for error for the ink to totally print off-kilter.

But boy did it pay off.

As I had different colors within the original animation, I could see more distinction between the multiple letters that popped on screen. Super impressed with how it overlayed on top of the print and made the riso print just that much sweeter.

the magic of riso

The beautiful part of art is the accidental magic you find just by playing around. The riso just did that because of a mistake I must’ve made, where in my confusion getting the masters unsynchronized, led to this misprint.

final animation

sound on! 

small artist’s statement: emails lowkey stress me out because of my perfectionism. I get really in my head writing them. this loop animation was born to reflect how I feel about ’em!

s/o Kolten ‘K-Webb’ Webber for helping me make some sfx magic!

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That’s all for my adventures with the riso! If you’d like to see a mono-color riso animation, you can check it out here. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in another rendition of motion talks!