When watercolour meets riso - Summer intern experiments with Lauren
Hello, my name is Lauren! (@lauren.m.sharples)
You may have seen me from time to time on the @riso_pop Instagram over these past few months. I joined Aafke at the studio on June 1st for a short summer internship to fulfil a creative summer here in this beautiful city, learning about riso and working in a studio environment with other creatives!
I am a third year Illustration student from Leeds UK studying at Leeds Arts University and have a focused interest in printmaking, book/zine making and children’s book illustration.
With existing knowledge in manual forms of printing such as lino and screen-printing, I wanted to learn a new form printmaking and push myself from my comforts in analogue working to the digital world. I have discovered that riso is a great option for combining both hand drawn and digital ways of working and in this blog I will be showing you how I applied riso into my existing style!
With guidance from Aafke and interns Emma and Yuteni I soon picked up the wonderful ways of this printing process and jumped into assisting Aafke in the studio workshops, where I was able to meet some wonderful participants and other creatives in the city!
I also got the chance to attend the Riso Club in July where we made some lovely postcards! I made some of my own which allowed me to put my riso knowledge into practice and experiment further with file prepping in photoshop.
Inspired by Amsterdam
I completely fell in love with Amsterdam when I moved here for the summer and was spending a lot of my free time exploring and admiring the cafes, parks, and everyday life here, with my sketchbook in hand.
One of the first things I noticed when I moved was the green Parakeets flying around from my window… I have since discovered this is a common sight here, but I was completely amused and fascinated by them! I started to paint them and have since been developing my first children’s story book based on the parakeets and how they arrived here in Amsterdam (I have heard a few fun theories during my stay!) After my days at the studio I would enjoy some time on the terrace illustrating and writing this story and watching them flying in flocks above my flat. This leads me onto my personal project here at Riso Pop…
As my internship at Riso Pop is short, I would not have time to develop my children’s story in riso here at the studio, so I decided to develop some prints for the pop shop transforming my city scenes and children’s book illustrations into prints that you can purchase!
An illustration from my story
cafe sketching
When watercolour meets riso…
Yuteni’s internships overlapped, meaning I got to spend a lot of time with her in the studio and would often work on studio projects togther aswell as taking interest in each others personal works.
We were discussing ways in which I could turn my watercolour studies from my sketchbook into riso prints, without re-painting them into separate layers.
Side note: in order to print with riso our image/ drawing needs to be split into separate colour layers and switched to greyscale before printing (this will become clearer as you read on)
Yuteni introduced me to a programme called ‘Spectrolite’ which is usually used for colour separation in photography, detecting which riso colours would most accurately represent the original photograph. We were both curious how well it would work when inserting a watercolour painting, so we put it to the test…
Original watercolour scan
I wanted to turn this watercolour study of the parakeets into an A4 riso print, so I first dropped my original scan of the painting into spectrolite as a PDF.
Aqua and Yellow on the colour combo chart
Thanks to Yuteni’s new colour combo chart design I was able to see what colours I needed to create a palette in Spectrolite that would give me these greens from my painting. I selected Yellow, Fluorescent orange and Aqua then clicked ‘Riso-ify’ in the programme and it split my painting into these three layers as shown below.
At this stage it is still hard to tell wether the colours will translate accurately as this is only a preview we get to see on the programme, so I saved the three files in greyscale as PDF’s ready for printing and continued with the next steps at the printer…
Yellow layer (greyscale)
Fluorescent orange layer (greyscale)
Aqua layer (greyscale)
The results !
Yellow & fluorescent Orange
Aqua - print. vs. original painting
I was really surprised at the accuracy of the colours - I used slightly cream paper (biotop 160gsm) which I think darkened the greens slightly, but overall I am really impressed with this programme and have discovered that it works really well for transforming paintings into riso prints. Of course this programme also has its negatives.. by having spectrolite split the layers for you in the correct opacities, it does eliminate the experimental fun that riso can bring and I would not rely on this programme every time, however, as a newby to riso, it has been beneficial to see examples of layer separation and how the lighter opacity layers mix with the darker shades. This is also an efficient way of creating mass copies of your paintings in riso style!
This first experiment with watercolour into riso using spectrolite was quite straight forward, in that the colours I needed for my palette were obvious. I needed green, so, yellow and aqua and then for the orange beaks, of course fluo orange. But what happens you have a painting consisting of many more colours?
I took this watercolour scene from my childrens story and dropped it into spectrolite. I want to note that spectrolite does not tell you what colours to use, instead you choose the colours and it will give you a preview of how those colours will transform into a riso print.
Original watercolour painting
Spectrolight
I knew I needed a dark colour to pick out the dark brown details of this print, so originally I chose burgundy, which gave a very purply hue in the preview rather than brown, so I played around, selecting a few. different variations, but the most accurate preview came from yellow, fluorescent orange and black. I was feeling dubious about the black at first as it is so strong and dark, but I was curious to see the results so I took these PDF’s to the printer…
Here are the first two colours printed. after seeing this I was almost certain the black would not work, how would it blend with fluo orange and yellow to make out the greens and the blues from my painting?.. but then..
It worked!
This print is now available to buy on the pop shop !
Pros and cons of Spectrolite
To wrap up my experience with transforming my watercolour creations into riso, it is definitely possible to work directly with the printer by painting in separate layers using transparent paper and black ink/ watercolour paints, however it is much harder to achieve accurate combinations and attracts more experimental vibrant prints, which is very authentically riso. I think if you are wanting more accurate colour matches and want to use a variety of colours, then Spectrolite is a great option. I have enjoyed experimenting with both processes during my time here at the studio and plan to continue these experiments when I return to University.
Pros:
Spectrolite allows access to all riso colours. so you can select and save the colours that you have access to in your studio when setting up the programme.
Spectrolite is free!
You can achieve accurate colour results to your original design. This is very useful for designs that involve multiple colours.
preview mode allows you to test different colour combinations/ palettes before printing, which could save you from wasting masters. I have discovered that the preview is extremely accurate and reliable.
It makes the process much faster if you are under time pressure.
If you are a die hard analogue artist this is a very useful programme. It is much easier to arrange your layers digitally with the useful tool of ‘layers’ in photoshop, however, creating these layers manually with hand drawn techniques can be a little more tricky and. time consume (but also gives more unpredictable results which can be nice).
Even though spectrolite gives you your layers / PDF’s ready to print, you can still take them into photoshop and edit them further if you wanted and there is scope to edit the layers within the programme too!
Cons:
There is one main ‘con’ to this programme and that is that is does a lot of the work for you, taking away the experimental process that comes with riso. Like I say, I would not become reliant on this programme when using riso, because you could pretty much drop any photograph, illustration, painting etc into the programme and turn it into a nice riso print, however there is still value in seeing the layers spectrolite creates and how the different opacities mix together to create a specific colour.
It can make results look less ‘riso-y’ if this makes sense! One of the most recognisable things about is its vibrancy! Spectrolite is so accurate that it almost eliminates the signature riso colour style from the print.
Colour mixing experiments
Away from Spectrolite I continued my experiments with the riso colours here at the studio and discovered some interesting colour combinations. I wanted to turn some of my line drawings into riso prints, but using a mixture of colours at different opacities to create new colours.
I started with this sketch, creating 2 identical layers that would be aligned directly on-top of one another to create a deep brown. I used yellow as my first layer at 100%. opacity and burgundy as my second at 25% opacity.
Layer 1 - Yellow
Layer 2 - Burgundy
Result
I love how unpredictable the riso process is, even when you have an idea of what the outcome may be, it always finds a way to surprise you and this makes it all the more fun… meaning yes, I now have the riso bug! I cant wait to keep experimenting with colour mixing and implementing this technique into future projects.
For one last colour mixing experiment below I created this olive green ‘Jordaan’ print by layering identical copies of yellow (100%), teal (50%) and burgundy (30%) on top of one another. I think this has been my favourite colour mix yet!
‘Jordaan’ print
I hope you enjoyed this little insight into my journey with riso and how my prints on the pop shop came to be! I hope you enjoy these prints as much as I did making them!
The prints you have seen in this blog post ‘Fietsstad’ , ‘Jordaan’ and ‘Stoplight’ are currently available in a variety of colours on the pop shop.
Sadly my time at Riso Pop had come to an end and I have headed back to Leeds to finish my studies. My summer in Amsterdam working with Aafke, Yuteni and Emma has been truly unforgettable and I have every intention on returning to this city that I have fallen in love with to continue creating!
Thank you for reading!
Lauren
