What is Riso?
Risograph machines are like electronic screen print photocopiers – instead of fixing toner to the page with a laser they cut stencils which are attached to ink drums printing more ecologically friendly inks onto the surface of the page. This means we always use uncoated paper – shiny magazine-style paper stock won’t work and it’s not really the riso aesthetic.
Our riso machine is called Lyra, short for Philyra, who was the Ancient Greek goddess of paper, writing and, randomly, perfume!
How Should We Submit Files?
We’re going to need your artwork in a black and white pdf or as a black and white a3 printed sheet and you’ll need to tell us which of our nine colours you want it printed in – we have black, metallic gold, bright red, sunflower yellow, green, purple, medium blue, aqua and fluro pink. Greyscale images in different colours can be difficult to visualise, so do check out our sample poster at the shop to get a rough idea of how things might look. If you want to print more than one colour you will need to send us separate pdfs for each colour which line up to make the final image. So here you can see two files were submitted, one a black outline of a square, the other a fully black square. We send the black outline to the black drum and the black square to the red drum and presto! A red square with a black border.
The images need to be perfectly aligned so that they “register” – if you submit files that don’t register it’ll show. Lyra is accurate to within about 3mm, meaning you could get as much as a 3mm shift in registration from copy to copy – this is one of the idiosyncrasies of riso printing – it’s a part of why we love it! To limit registration errors it can be an idea to have thick black outlines that you colour into. For instance above you’ll notice the black outline and the filled-in black square are in fact almost the same size, so when the filled one gets sent to the red drum the red and black merge seamlessly as the black is darker than the red colouring into it. It can be fun to play around with registration – some people deliberately misregister their images as an aesthetic choice – in the example below some wag has deliberately shifted the file being sent to the red drum a bit to the bottom and right so the colour and linework don’t quite match. How funky. How Andy Warhol.*
- that is grosly unfair, Andy Warhol’s registration was pretty spot on, but you know what I mean – it’s art, darling!