Spring Open Studio - The highlights

Since its first edition, the Open Studio event has grown and become a true Riso Pop classic. We love when our community comes together, turning our small studio into a buzzing creative space!

Aside from the community aspect, there's a practical side too. The Open Studio serves as an opportunity for us to declutter our storage, highlighting existing Pop Shop classics as well as our latest goodies, and using the proceeds to fund new Riso Pop projects.

Essentially, the Open Studio weekend is a circular event, with multiple activities going on at the same time: mini workshops, a screen printing station, a Pop Shop pop-up store and of course our own riso exhibition! The official opening of the exhibiton took place on Saturday evening (and included of course a heartfelt thank-you speech).

If you couldn’t make it, or just want to rewind and relive the weekend from the comfort of your own couch, here’s a quick recap :)

A window into spring

This year's edition was centered around the theme of Spring and featured the special riso exhibition  ‘A window into spring’ – our invitation to creators of all kinds to share their interpretation of spring through illustration, design, photography or collage.

Until now our biggest Open Call has been our Riso 3D project where we received around 50 entries. But as this year’s deadline got closer and closer, our inbox slowly but surely flooded with submissions, resulting in an overwhelming total of 106 entries! This Spring Print Exhibition is the biggest Riso Pop Community Project we have ever done so far!

It took a few days to check files and print (as we were printing four colours!) and then cut the artworks. Using thumbnails, we created an overview of all the prints, organizing them by shape and composition, before displaying them on our studio wall.

We are still amazed by the results and the large crowd that joined us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on Saturday evening.

Other activities

During this weekend, visitors could join our Mini Workshops, a spin-off series on our Taster Workshops, where they got their first introduction to the risograph and the printing technique. Using prompts, they created and printed their own designs during a short but fun session! By the end of the hour, the end results were displayed outside in the garden.

In addition to our traditional Mini Workshops and Pop Shop, we added a screen printing station, thanks to the efforts of our intern: Justyna. We had lots of fun trying it out ourselves before launching it as an activity during the Open Studio. The new design (featuring of course none other than Tjido) will be used on our goodiebags and – Pop Shop alert – tote bags. Keep an eye on our website!

Overall it was a truly lovely weekend and we were happy to welcome amazing people both living here in the Netherlands as well as those who travelled specially for this event.  

We had lots of fun, printing riso, screen printing, enjoying our sunny garden, and ending the day with a good party with lovely drinks and good chats.

Here is a visual recap of our favourite moments, captured by Loes Klinker:

An of course none of this would be possible without the whole team:
Interns: Justyna, Mei-Yun & Chris
Studio assistant: Yuteni
(Honourable mention to our friends of the studio: Anders, Brian and Mandy. Thank you for your absolutely wonderful help!)