I spent time at a risograph printing studio to create physical prints of Orbitals, my upcoming generative art collection, and here I want to share my process and experience with it.
But before I jump into that, you’re probably wondering “what is risograph printing?” so let’s start with a quick introduction to this printing technique in case this is new to you.
What is Risograph Printing
Risograph printing is a printing method that was initially developed for mass printing for offices and schools. At its core, the Risograph is a high-speed duplicating machine that acts like a photocopier. However, instead of using traditional inkjet or laser printing, Risograph printers use a stencil-based process that involves creating a master copy of the image to be printed, which is then wrapped around a drum and ink is forced through tiny perforations in the master onto the paper.
Even thought it started off targeting the mass commercial market, the printing technique then found a niche in many creative fields, when artists sort of hijacked the machine to create magazines and posters.
Risograph printing is also renowned for its vibrant and saturated colors, and also for its standardization of colors. This means that if you pick the standard Risograph colors for a print project or even a generative art project, anyone will be able to print the art on paper and to get the correct colors without any need for color calibration like it’s the case with other printing processes.
I was curious about this printing method, so I decided to use Orbitals as a project to experiment with and create my first physical prints using Risograph printing. I had the chance to spend time at a Risograph studio and to work with the machines myself so I could get the final result I intended.
My Process of Creating Physical Prints for Orbitals
The starting point was to create a few custom Orbitals outputs which could render well with the Risograph process.
I’m sharing below some of the outputs I created.
I selected the bottom right one as the final design.
You will notice that they are all black and white, and that’s on purpose: in Riso, you have to print every color separately with its own master sheet, and the way it works is that every color will have its own file or layer, and then black will be 100% of the color applied to paper, and white will have 0% of the color. Any gradient of gray means that a lower opacity of color will be applied to paper.
In my case, I wanted to also experiment with creating gradients, so I picked two pairs of colors among the ones available at the studio, and also prepare my file so that the black and white image would be turned into two complementary gradient images, so that each of the two colors could be printed on top of each other and blend to create a color gradient.
Below I am sharing those two files so you can understand what was the starting point and what it ended up creating. It’s the same image on the left and on the right, the only thing that changes is that one has a gradient from the bottom right while the other one has a grident from the top left.
And finally I’m sharing below a video of the printing process itself, along with the final prints, which I did using two different pairs of colors just for fun.
One important limitation of Riso in the realm of generative art is that the system is designed for mass printing. When you set up the machine, you do so for a particular design, and then you can print up to 10,000 copies of that same design. If you wanted to print 10,000 unique designs, you’d have to set up the machine every time before you print every unique design, and if the design has multiple colors, this would end up being totally counterproductive.
Riso is not exactly the best tool to print all the unique outputs of generative art algorithms, but it can definitely be something used to print a commemorative output that represents a collection, or something to be offered as a physical giveaway.
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