Every Wednesday during term time I’m at Rabbits Road Press, a community Risograph printing press in Manor Park. I work there as a technician (resisting the urge to put this in inverted commas), teaching people how to make Riso prints. Duties involve pressing ‘cancel’ when error codes show up, wiggling the drum when there’s a phantom paper jam and changing things like paper pressure, alignment and image contrast. I also offer advice and give my personal opinion on people’s work, no one really asks for this but it’s become a habit and no one’s told me to shut up and mind my own business yet so will probably continue. Watching the work of our regular members take interesting twists and turns keeps the job very interesting and informs my own practice but I’m increasingly aware that my knowledge of the machine and various functions it offers is limited.
In an attempt to be a better informed and skilled technician, I’ve taken a week off (generously supported by an A-n bursary) to undertake a self-organised print residency in Birmingham. During the week I’ll be at Rope Press, focussing on layering colours, printing photos using CMYK and learning more about using Photoshop for Riso. In addition to skilling up on Risograph printing, I’ve also arranged to spend an afternoon with Birmingham based print maker Brid (Do Make Say Ink) who has a very nifty and impressive screen printing workshop set-up in her home. I feel like screen printing is the very skilful and serious grandmother of Riso and am keen to get my head around the process and hopefully get past the impression I have of it being a very labour intensive, messy and time sensitive printing technique.
www.sofianiazi.co.uk / @sofia_niazi / @rabbitsroadpress
I was back at Rope Press for the final day of my printing journey of self discovery and armed with a serious to-do list. On Wednesday I learned how to separate the colour channels of a photograph into CMYK layers and Riso print it in 4 colours with some amazing results. I wanted to try this process out again but using a more colourful image and was also keen to test whether using a painted image instead of a photograph would work. We separated the layers of the file the same way as we did for the photograph and printed a blue and black layer first and then a yellow and red layer before layering all four colours onto the same sheet. The first time we tried this the image came out a bit too orange but Reece has a lot of CMYK printing experience so was able to tweak the levels of ink in each layer to get an overall image that resembled the original more closely. By the end of the trial and error process I had a print which had the most colours I had ever seen in a Riso print and was so pleased and surprised at how the painting had translated into a Riso print. Printing full colour illustrations without preparing separate layers in the original artwork was something I had never considered.
I also wanted to try to print some artwork I had pre-prepared as 3 layers for 3 colour printing without separating the colour channels. I knew this would have a much more ‘blocky’ effect since all of the layers were selected and cropped by me and not filtered in Indesign, I thought this was the way that I was most likely to work when I got back to Rabbits Road Press so wanted to take advantage of the fact that Rope Press have ‘yellow’ and see how it would print in pink, yellow and blue in a more straight forward way. I liked the image it produced even though it looked messier than the previous technique. It would require a lot more skill and practice on my part when preparing the artwork to achieve a more thoughtful range of colour blends and textures but it resembled something that looked a lot more like it had gone through a print making process and it was easier to decode how the colours had been achieved.
Last but definitely not least, I used the session as an opportunity to try out some ideas I had for patterns which I could use on notebook covers later. I preprepared the layers using paper, glue, scissors, card and ink and would use the scanning bed instead of a computer to scan in the layers. This was meant to be the most straight forward thing I would do all week but the incredible colour range at Rope Press made it difficult to decide on a colour scheme. With some advice from Reece and a few weird colour combinations I decided that these would resemble the freckled effect I was going for. I brought my own card so I could print a batch and will be turning hem into sketchbooks/notebooks next week.
Reece was a fabulous and very encouraging teacher, if you’d like to book a private printing session with him or get some work printed by Rope Press, drop them an email.
Many of the things that I made during the residency are available to buy online here or IRL at The Corner Shop.
You can find out more about Risograph printing and make your own prints in London at Rabbits Road Press every Wednesday during term time or sign-up for the Summer Riso Residency week.
www.sofianiazi.co.uk / @sofia_niazi / @rabbitsroadpress
Of all the different printing techniques/processes I’ve tried, screen-printing is the one I’ve struggled the most with, both in terms of making it to the end of the process and in terms of producing work that I actually like. I’ve tried it the long way, at a well equipped, high tech print studio with an experienced technician at art school, and the short way, using a basic home kit, hand cut stencils and an A4 info sheet for guidance. Each way of working had its own setbacks, access to specialist equipment made if difficult to reproduce the high quality prints I achieved at uni and paper stencils getting mushy meant home kits were too clumsy for transferring my illustrations onto fabric neatly. So I stayed away from screen printing.
But, I got some tote bags printed from a screen printer called Brid (Do Make Say Print) not so long ago and when I went to pick them up I noticed that she had an amazing screen-printing station set up in her house. This made me think that maybe, perhaps, possibly I too could achieve something beyond mushy paper and smudged ink designs without having to become a member of an expensive print studio. I shared my thoughts with Brid and asked if I could book a private workshop with her and she said yes (yess).
So, Thursday’s workshop is at Brid’s place learning how to screen print. I spent the afternoon session working with some artwork I had sent Brid earlier in the week and going through a list of things I wanted to learn including; how to prepare art work for screen-printing, step by step how to screen print, how to set up a station and any other tips. Brid had prepared a very excellent check list and resource sheet for me with all the materials I would need, useful links and lots of tips/suggestions. I watched Brid go through all of the steps, made lots of notes and learned about exposing screens, different functions on Illustrator for preparing artwork, inks, registration, how to print onto fabric, how to cure the ink and also many many more things.
Brid was an excellent teacher and I learned way more than I had expected to. Here are some of the final pieces.
Arrange a private session with Brid or send her your print job- http://www.domakesayink.com
I had big drawing plans for the third day but they were overshadowed by my lack of preparation for a 4 colour CMYK Riso workshop I had booked for 7pm. The workshop was at Rope Press and I needed to have sent through a photograph before it began so instead of getting my drawing materials out I settled for a camera and headed to the Botanical Gardens. There were lots of lovely and interesting looking plants from different climates in the gardens and greenhouses, since the workshop would explore CMYK printing I was on the look out for a colourful composition, I took a few pics of plants and sent a selection over to Reece (Rope Press co-founder/technician) ahead of the session.
We have a limited colour range at Rabbits Road Press but Riso printing with CMYK layers can achieve a crazy amount of colour variations. Since we don’t currently have a computer hooked up to our Riso machine at Rabbits Road, printing artwork using this process (which is done through separating colour channels in Indesign/photoshop) has always seemed mystical and unattainable.
The workshop was great (!) and working with digital files was a lot more manageable than I had expected. Reece showed us how to separate the layers, make a contact sheet and adjust contrast and ink levels to try to achieve a final print that was as close to the original as possible. The process required quite a bit of trial and error and a lot of know-how on Reece’s part. I was very happy with the final result although felt kinda stupid for not picking an original image with more colours.
I left the workshop encouraged but wanting to try the process again using a more colourful image. I’ll be returning on Friday to have another go and print a few other things, hopefully more prepared!
Day 1 of my residency was a flop and doesn’t warrant its own post so I’ve decided my residency actually starts today, Tuesday. On Monday I missed my train in an attempt to track down a lightbox I lost in Ilford the previous evening, with no success. I arrived in Birmingham a few hours later than intended and spent the afternoon chilling in Birmingham, coming to terms with my loss and reflecting on how I always had a bad feeling about Ilford.
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Day two has been very good. I realised my hotel accommodation has two ‘naturally occurring’ lightboxes so no more dwelling on the past. I spent the morning organising my desktop, reducing the dense constellation of docs sprawled over my screen into a few accurately labelled folders. I found a quiet spot at the Library of Birmingham to work in and worked through my ‘to do’ list. I spent time reading a few pieces of text I intended to illustrate and gathered reference imagery from the internet which I could work from later. After lunch I returned for some serious ‘away from keyboard’ time. I found the art section and was very excited to see there was a large collection of art and design books with lots of very old titles. I’ve found it difficult in London to find a non-bureaucratic library which has a good collection of art and design books, I need to make more of an effort to do this when I get back. The afternoon was spent going through books about printing, drawing, collage and anything else I liked the sound/look of. My favourite was an old book about drawing, it made me want to draw more.
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I headed to Cass Art to buy some supplies and then to a coffee shop to meet Charlotte Bailey, illustrator and organiser of Birmingham’s Laydeez do Comics. I had asked her to bring some of her work if possible which she did. We chatted for a while and she gave me a zine she made about Janelle Monae which she had printed at Rope Press, looking forward to reading it. She also showed me her sketchbook with some ink drawings she had been working on. Her drawings are so nice and I was seeing them with a new freshness having gone through so many drawing books in the library, being more attentive to detail and picking up on the different types of strokes she used. I admired how instinctually she worked.
www.sofianiazi.co.uk / @sofia_niazi / @rabbitsroadpress
