For some of us, living in a pandemic means having to be creative about well.. being creative.

I normally print at an open screen printing studio called Print Club, but with the Covid numbers running very high and the latest lockdown, I decided it was safer for me to stop going for a while.

During the first lockdown I stopped going for nearly 3 months. I had to stop work on a half done print, which was very frustrating. During that time, I drew a lot, I planned new post-lockdown prints, and I did a lot on the admin and business side of my practice. So overall I managed to stay busy, but I missed printing a lot.

This time, I was ready. As Covid numbers rose, I started working on prints I could do in a day or so, rather than the 6-7 layers prints I had been doing which could take several weeks. I also investigated other ideas to keep on printing during lockdown and this is how Riso printing came into my life.

It is similar to screen printing in a lot of respects: the design is built layer by layer, colour by colour, and uses positives to determine where the ink should go and where it shouldn’t. The main difference is that instead of applying the ink manually by pushing it through a screen with a squeegee, it is applied through a drum in a stencil duplicating machine. So there are more limitations to what you print on (paper size and thickness) and in the number of available colours, compared to what I normally do, but having screen printing experience meant I could quickly get my head around it. I knew I had several designs that could work very well with this technique, after a few tweaks.

And best of all, it would work well for my situation as I wouldn’t need to go to out to print them myself; instead I would prepare the design at home and send it to be printed by a specialised studio.

I decided to give it a go, and got in touch with the wonderful Duplikat Studio to learn more. It took a bit of time to finalise the design, and to make sure it would work as well as possible with this technique. I picked the colours- I already knew the colour palette I wanted to use so it was just a case of picking the nearest hues from the available colours and checking how they would work together. Then came the choice of paper- it tends to be thinner than screen printing paper as it needs to work in the machine, but there are still a lot of options to pick from in terms of colour, weight, grain. 

Finally my print was ready to proceed so there was nothing more for me to do than wait for the final result. That part was a bit daunting, as I am using to screen printing where I am in control (sort of) at all stages, and here I had to relinquish control to the printing team. 

But when the print arrived, I was completely won over! The colours are vibrant, and my design worked very well in that format. I loved it so much that within weeks I was back with another design, and I am already planning a few more!

So will it replace screen printing for me? No, I enjoy being in the studio and printing stuff myself too much, and the range of colours and sizes are more suited to some of my work. But I do think Riso will have a place in my practice, and not simply as a lockdown replacement for screen printing.

I have other designs in mind that I think could work and can imagine creating works specifically to print this way. I will share more posts as I continue to experiment with it so lets see where this adventure takes me!