Trip Date: Sunday 7th August 2022
Learning about the art and knowledge of risograph printing.
Blog by Charlotte Done
With the plans for printing the 1st Morecambe Sundae Art Zine are well underway and dreams of having our own Community Riso printer in Morecambe, move closer towards reality. On Sunday, a group of us went to Manchester for a very inspirational and exciting workshop to learn about the ways of the self-publishing dream machine that is the Risograph printer!
We made our way to Partisan - not far from Salford Central.
Partisan Collective is a Cooperative arts and social space who provide an inclusive, accessible, not-for-profit platform and space.
We met Lisa Lorenz who runs Trident Press from there, she was our brilliant tutor for the day. Team Trident Press are a small publishing and DIY print service, dedicated to eco-friendly printing they also run brilliant community workshops in bookbinding and zine making.
The walls of their studio were filled with risograph art and riso printed photography, there’s something about the depth of colour you get with the riso inks that are immensely pleasing!
We’re supplied with teas and coffees and a guide to Risography, that sets out the process, how to prepare your artwork, how to use the printer and how to lay out your pages to print a zine, all in a simple, comprehensible way.
You can buy a copy from Trident Press for £8.
Or borrow my copy ~ I’ll leave it at the Good Things Studios.
This course is not only a lovely relaxing workshop in an inspiring space, with a very knowledgeable and patient tutor - we also get an induction to be able to use the Riso machine ourselves! It’s so nice to be allowed to use the machine, and be trusted and feel part of the risograph world! We hope to set up the Morecambe Press using a similar model.
We were shown the machine by Lisa and how to use it. The Riso machine is only made by the Riso Kagaku Corporation in Japan, and it’s very much a friendly, helpful, robot, with easy-to-follow instructions.
You can scan in your image or send it using a driver from your pc. You choose your colour by placing the appropriate drum in, pick your paper size, make the right adjustments, and away you go. It’s very efficient, printing 150 pages a minute.
The inks used are non toxic soy oil based, the machine doesn’t use heat to dry the ink and everything prints best on non coated, recycled paper.
The process is basically low cost with a low carbon footprint.
The Riso machine prints in a similar way to screen printing using one colour at a time, but that one colour prints the various shades and tones that you would get in a black & white photograph, and the colours are so vibrant and lush! One of the most exciting parts was the second layer of colour being printed and many delighted noises were heard as our prints rolled off the press.
We’ll be printing our own Morecambe Sundae Art Zine here, next month, using it to raise funds for our Morecambe based Riso printer through a CrowdFunder ~ So keep an eye out for that!
If you want to get hold of our limited edition, self published, Morecambe themed, art & info zine, that’ll be the way!
For all updates you can follow the instagram page… the.morecambe.sundae.art.zine
The Morecambe Sundae Art Zine is a project initiated and led by Charlotte Done Illustrations.
Network members can apply to run their own trip or other 'Inspiration and Learning' activities via our web portal: https://www.creativewestend.net/network