The Workshop Series: Risograph Printing w/ DOLCE PUBLISHING

As we learned, Risograph printing first launched in 1984, courtesy of the Riso Kagaku Corporation of Japan and was designed to be a fast and cheap way of photocopying. It is an environmentally friendly and cost effective printer, which uses soy-based inks to produce unique outcomes.

Because of Riso’s similarities to screen printing and the large variety of colors (some of which don’t have an equivalent in the Pantone color system as they are custom-made), designers and artists have begun adapting these machines to create everything from illustrations, cards, stationary designs, books, and more. Defined by vibrant colors, a sense of thick texture, spot colour and charming imperfections, Riso is now used as a means of producing art editions while giving the possibility to the artists and designers to explore and experiment with the creative process.

The Riso Printer and the printing process

Riso printers are still manufactured, and today’s models plug directly into a computer. With the basic models you can print one color at a time. By feeding your pages through two, three or more times, changing the master artwork, and the ink each run, and you can achieve exciting, multicolor results. Riso printing can be inaccurate and unpredictable very often, since the machines were designed to make office copies and not for high precision printing.

You have to embrace that unpredictability and enjoy the experimentations!

The workshop series is a series of creative workshops varying from paper making and lettering to collage, linocut printmaking, silkscreen printing and much more that we run at our office in a regular basis. Through these workshops we want to explore our creativity using more hands-on practices and develop processes for understanding, developing and supporting mutual learning between our team.