KEEP WORKING

I’m starting to feel like a broken record—- here’s this shitty thing, here’s this one. All true and real— and frankly, unmanageable. Skating between “holy shit utter collapse” and “life goes on” is an all-day job.

The fact remains that you have work to do.

When I fired up this newsletter, I claimed I’d post process stuff from my little print shop, and I’ve done very little of that.

I ran some real cool tests last week, and don’t we all want to see cool things instead of horrible ones? I sure do. So here we go.

Here’s the backstory— for about a decade (before I melted down, dismantled my studio of 15 years, stopped being an “artist”, and sold it to my pal Shanai) I had a Riso GR 3750 duplicator at my studio. It was a tank of a Riso. Loved it. Among may other things, I printed all of the FOLRATH zines on it, and the zine version of RECIDIVIST IV (easily the craziest print object I’ve ever made). But anyway, I lost my fucking mind and got rid of it (To a great home, at least).

Once I started putting my skull back together, I missed it. A lot. But even in the back of my mind, when I quit everything, I thought “damn, a 2-color Riso would be nice”. And I thought, well, if I ever DO want to “be an artist” again, I’m getting a 2-color machine.

Long story short, I did. I got an MZ 790 from some eBay ass hat. Wasn’t working when it got to me (he also “cut me a deal” on some drums that were damaged on arrival. I should be nicer but…) and after a year I had almost completely given up (riso techs are Unicorn Dodo Birds these days) until the amazing Robert Baxter/ Riso wizard showed up in town and got it back up to speed, a few months ago. Cannot say enough about this dude. But he got it in shape, and since then it’s been pretty dreamy.

For the non-nerds out there, a Riso (or Risograph) is this somewhat bizarre printing machine (actually a “duplicator”) that sort of combines a copy machine, screen printing, and….other things. I think they were made for office use, but in the early 2000’s the zine freaks got wind, and starting doing crazy shit with them. At first (having a real offset press I’d sort of taught myself to use), I thought man what is this bunk. Imprecise, can’t hold solids, janky registration, etc. Then I slowly realized those things were the CHARM; it’s down and dirty, with a really handmade, weird organic quality, without the crazy setup offset requires. You can bang stuff out in a heartbeat, and switch up on a dime.

But basically, what it does is this: there is a dedicated print drum, for each color. You run each color, one by one: do all the yellow, load them back into the machine, do the next color, etc etc. BUT with every pass, there’s a lot of variance in terms of feed/ registration, so 4 colors, registering perfectly…very difficult. And you're going to lose a lot of sheets. With a 2 drum machine, you can absolutely lock those 2 colors, on one pass. It takes out an insane amount of wiggles. Riso printing is NOT about making something perfect, it’s about making something weird and cool looking.

So, finally— I’m in a position to give full color a shot on this thing. My cartoonist pal (and former publisher) Tom K of the wonderful Uncivilized Books had a project with a Danish cartoonist named Emil Friis Ernst: a full color Riso zine that he wants to republish here in the states. Can I handle that? Well, not sure. Never would have even tried on the old machine.

Let’s do a test and find out, I says.

Again, for not nerds: full color printing is CMYK, which means 4 colors blending (in small dot patterns) to create a full color image. Those very specific colors are pure Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (which is black). The thing is, 3 of those those colors do not exist with a Riso, so you are making up a color profile to get close.

Each separation/ color is printed out as gray tonalities. They look like this:

Also, whatever sep you’re printing has to be made of DOTS, or halftones. The old machine had 2 internal dot settings, the choices being “kind of small, sort of” and “pretty big”. So, this was my first shot at seeing how small the dot patterns were, and I was shocked; it’s REAL small. Caught all the gradations of gray, and I couldn’t even see the tiny dot patterns with my naked old man eyes. So that was nice.

The straight “yellow” Riso ink is…real transparent, and not good for much, on its own. It’s light and somewhat boring. So I decided to switch to a better yellow called Sunflower in my shop, which I used here for the Y sep.

Same thing with Cyan. It doesn’t exist, so you sort of take your pick of other blues. I went with Cornflower, which is really far off from Cyan, but a very nice color on its own (I used it for “A Monty”).

Now, if you’ve seen a Risograph print, there’s something of a “signature” Riso color; it’s called Fluorescent Pink. It’s really unique, and a lot of people use that for the Magenta. I like it, but wanted to experiment with something that doesn't necessarily scream RISO PRINT at you. I’m actually still deciding what that color is going to be (Bright Red or maybe…Bubblegum?), but for the time being I just used what was left in my red drum— a (way too dark for Magenta) red called Scarlet. It was a bit nuts.

And finally, the K (or Black, for the linework. No dot on this one, you run it straight).

Obviously, every tiny registration inconsistency shows up when its compounded by 4, (and the red is way too dark/ opaque), but…pretty damn cool.

Lots more figuring out and tweaks before I get this entirely locked, I'm sure. But off the bat, it’s pretty exciting. We’re going to roll with it and I’ll provide a link when they are done.

Making beautiful stuff can pull you out of some dark places. I don’t care what anyone says.

—z