Jun 17

Jun 17 French Connection - Moonshine behind the scenes

Introduction

It’s now more than a month since I have been an intern at Riso Pop !

I’ve already learned so much from Aafke before and after starting officially in the studio. The internship started already partially online with talks about the community project moonshine which I launched after arriving. Then in the meantime I did different projects and prints for the studio that I will talk about more in detail in my next post!

The project

At the start of this community project my original idea was already for it to be a zine that has fun random themes. Then I had to think about how the end print will look like, the number of pages, illustrations and participants.

This is very important to know when organizing an open call or a project that has a limited amount of spots. And so because I chose to make it three different zines, it was easier to make sure that the same number of pages would be used for each theme by limiting the participants.

Then when I arrived at the studio we launched the project on instagram and on the Riso Pop website with a blog! You can access it with this link if you want to see the instructions and introduction page : moonshine blog. By the way, thank you to those who joined, I was not expecting the spots to go away so fast !

We gave the participants one month for creating a story and two illustrations (one big drawing and a thumbnail). We also sent them a Riso guide specifically for the project to remind the participants of the constraints and ways of preparing files for Riso printing. Then finally the deadline arrived and our time to shine and work hard came! Very hard work all planned through out the month of June. Starting with printing, then binding and shipping.

PRINTING

The longest part of the production was printing, we finished after two weeks! But it took so long because the ink on the prints needs to have enough time to rest for the best result. So to give you an idea the double sided prints with 3 colours need 4 days of printing!

For more details, we start by printing two colours (the lightest ones to avoid any print marks) yellow and red then let it dry and a day later print the last layer which is blue. And since the zines are double-sided we have another 2 days of printing the other sides.

Through the whole process it was such a pleasure to see all of your drawings printed!

Finally, before starting the binding process we launched the Pre-sale on the Pop shop.

BINDING

Then we started the binding process with the help of the newly arrived Lia (the new intern) but not only. I also invited a really good friend I met here for more workforce (thank you Lorena), we will definitely need all the help we can get!

Since, we will be binding a total of… 90 zines by hand !

All of the books are hand-sewn using the three-hole binding technique with different colours of thread per theme : Red for Ghosts in the toilet, yellow for Flying monsters and blue for Sleeping at the bottom of the sea.

And then for the finishing touch they are all cut neatly with the paper cutter!

SHIPPING

Before shipping the first zines we added some bonus goodies to the packaging. So, with your package you also get stickers and a bookmark!

These small additions were printed with a laser printer for practical reasons since these small objects will be together and inside the book printing them with Riso would’ve been risky. Since as you might know Riso printing never really sets in the paper so the ink can still transfer on your fingers and other surfaces.

Last words

This project was a really interesting experience, I learned a lot about community project management and the riso printing technique. Community zines is something I would probably like to try to do on my own as well. You can follow me on instagram for my future projects : @elizzza_m.

Thank you Aafke for making it possible and the participants for creating the content it was really fun!