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!
