Lia has been here at Riso Pop for almost two months, and her internship is coming to an end. During her time here she worked hard on her project: The Riso Pop Colour Cards! This was not a simple project and there were enough challenges along the way. But I will let you read her final blog post as she tells us more about this cool product she got to create!

Riso Pop’s Colour Cards
by Lia Appere

In my last blog post, I introduced the project I’ve been working on: Riso Pop Colour Cards and I’m happy to tell you that it is now finished and ready to go!

‘Riso Pop Colour Cards’ is a paper box including 8 cards, illustrating every colour available at Riso Pop and a flyer giving details about each illustration.

Every card features one riso colour, its gradients in different opacities and its official hex code. You can place the cards next to each other, see which colours and opacities work best together and make colour combinations.

A riso studio is full of interesting objects, such as the riso printer, inks, drums, tools… so I thought it would be fun to make these into characters, and bring them to life! The card box is an interactive object that can help riso beginners with colour choices, it also gives an overview of material and tools found at a riso studio, but it can also be a fun riso object to add to your collection.

The making of Colour Cards was quite an experience!

I enjoyed the independence and ability I had to choose what I want for this project as well as being there for every step, while having Aafke to guide me. I also got to print with all the colours available at Riso Pop!

making process and Challenges

The tricky part about this project was the small amount of time that I had in my hands: two months to draw, design and print the Colour Cards, followed by cutting and folding the paper boxes. But organisation and hard work made this project come to light.

The original idea was to create a card game entirely, including 32 cards with two colour combinations and its own game rules! But seeing the time we had it was too ambitious. I needed to make compromises…

There were also some challenges along the way, starting with the red ink drum, which broke! So I had to wait for it to be fixed to continue printing. Fortunately Aafke’s strong arms (and cool head) fixed it just in time to print the last card. In the end it was only a scare.

When designing the envelopes, my first idea was to print them with riso and use all eight colours, but I soon realised that not only would this mean passing each box more than 3 times through the machine, but the box would get the users fingers extremely dirty! This is why, I decided to make a clean design that would be enough to bring imagination and curiosity to people about what’s inside, using only one colour.

The original plan for the paper boxes was to get them cut with a plotter after printing, but the borrowed machine of paper-cut artist Jessamijn Alberts wouldn’t cut them how we wanted to, so Jessamijn and I ended up cutting them all by hand!

It has been quite a journey as you can see, but thankfully there were always creative solutions to all of these challenges!

You can now find the Colour Cards on the shop page, where only 15 boxes will be available! The 15 other ones will be part of the stock that Aafke will use in upcoming zine fests and events.

Daily life at the studio

Aside from Colour Cards, I also had multiple tasks at the studio. I assisted in multiple workshops as well as print sessions for the Riso Club.

Although what I thought was pretty cool, was taking over the social media together with Eliza, while Aafke was away on her summer holiday. This is something that we don’t learn at school, to manage social media daily. We both enjoyed creating small stories, pictures and videos to promote projects.

During this time we also worked on a ‘creative response project’ - where Aafke sent us a daily picture of her road trip and we would interpret this with various art materials. We created a small poster with these drawings to print with riso as a fun experimental giveaway.

Thanks

Thank you to Aafke for making this internship possible and really fun and thank you to Eliza and Jessamijn for their great help.

I have learned so much throughout these two months: about risograph printing of course, but also about professional work, myself and what I see in the future for me.

I feel so happy and grateful for having this opportunity and for taking it!