Making a comic with riso - Summer Intern Emma
Hello there. I’m Emma, a university student and comic artist from Germany! As part of my studies, I needed to take a practical semester somewhere outside of uni. As a long time fan of riso, I didn’t have to think too long about where I’d be doing my internship: definitely a riso studio!
While there are studios offering printing and doing wonderful work all around the world, Aafke’s approach to workshops and teaching instantly resonated with me. A space filled with people discovering the joys of riso. Riso Pop was the perfect thing after all these lockdowns!
For my intern project, Aafke gave me the opportunity to create my very own comic book while being here. I found that idea very exciting because while I have made comics before, I have never published on my own anywhere.
Through this blog post I wanted to share my process and experience in making and printing Alfhild, the shieldmaiden.
What story to tell?
Since my internship was relatively short, I decided that instead of starting a story from scratch and writing everything on my own, it would be better to adapt an already existing story (the story also needed to be old enough so that we did not have to worry about copyrights). While searching the web for ideas, I stumbled upon the story of Alfhild, a Danish woman warrior. Her story was written by a Danish historian in the middle ages, and this inspired my project.
A riso comic. What to consider?
There are a couple things that are different when you’re making a comic if it ends up being printed with riso. With riso, the colours you choose will be a defining factor during the creative process. So while I usually just start sketching and drawing, I had to think about how to separate my comic into different colours from the very beginning. Knowing that time was of the essence, I chose to work mainly with two colours.
My colour choice was yellow and teal because I knew that mixing the two would give me a pretty third value in a green shade (although teal and fluorescent orange were a close second place. See all the colours Riso Pop has here!)
Only the cover and a special fold out page are printed using three.
Here you can see the whole progress of one page (from left to right: inital sketch, digital sketch, teal lineart, showing yellow lineart, finished page)
A riso comic. Work process.
To keep my work fast and consistent throughout the process, every layer in photoshop was categorised into one of two folders, each folder being teal or yellow. In order to keep consistency throughout my zine, I choose to stick to specific values. For example with teal, everything was either 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 percent saturation.
One of the pictures above show you a small insight into my photoshop process.
As extra help, I kept notes on the colour values per character so it would result in the mixed colours I wanted.
The final step was arranging the pages into a booklet, printing everything with Riso. Truth be told I was very nervous during printing! But thanks to the studio and the support from Yuteni, Lauren and Aafke, I made it work.
A lot of you joined for printing sessions online or watched our Q&A on Instagram and I want to thank you all for the support as well as buying and reading the book. Couldn’t be prouder of my little viking pirate Alfhild!
If you’re interested in supporting Emma’s work and Riso Pop studio, you can buy a copy of Alfhild the shield maiden, through our Pop Shop here! :)
