OUGD404 - Studio Brief 02 - Risograph Printing Part I (The Internal Workings)

When making the choice of how I'd physically print this publication I ruled out digital printing first because it is a process that feels particularly corporate and somewhat clinical, which would not be complimentary to the content. I then considered a variety of physical processes including screenprinting and monoprinting, and also using a combination of the two with additional hand drawn elements, as these would have been the most appropriate production methods to convey the ideas of tenderness and intimacy. However, I also wanted to be able to produce a small run of copies, both for personal use and to convey the idea that tenderness can be shared in different ways - I am sharing my ideas about tenderness with each reader in turn, but I am also sharing a form of tenderness with a much larger group of people through the distribution of the publication. Risograph printing is a technique that I had become very familiar with during my Foundation course, and something that I was keen to return to this year. It lends itself to mass producing works, but also to giving a a very acute feeling of the handmade in what is ultimately a digital process, and so is perfectly suited for this project and ultimately why I chose to work with this method.

Risograph, or Riso, is a digital printing system that originated in Japan in the late 1980's. The machine itself appears very similar to a standard office photocopier, but combines the technology of a photocopier with the traditional art of screenprinting.

Printing on these machines is relatively simple - each machine is comprised of either one or two ink drums (depending on the model) that print separate layers of colour to make up a full print. An image is either sent digitally to the machine or is scanned in using the glass plate on the top of the machine, similar to a photocopier. The originals to be printed should always be in greyscale, as similar to when one would expose an image on to a silk screen, the Riso will only pick up the different shades within the image. The darker the area on the original image, the more densely the colour will be printed - black produces 100% density, white produces 0% density, and a medium grey will produce 50% density.

A Riso RP3700 machine

A pink ink drum half inserted in the machine

A master is then created from this image - a stencil made by the means of tiny heat spots on a thermal plate that burn voids (corresponding to image areas) into a master sheet. This master is then wrapped around a drum and ink is forced through the voids in the master to create the print. The paper runs flat through the machine while the drum rotates at high speed to create each image on the paper.

Digital screen showing the master making process

A print-ready master sheet wrapped around a green drum, saturated with ink

Diagram showing the internal mechanism of a Risograph machine

The drums themselves contain a tube of printing ink at their core and a surrounding cylindrical mesh screen, similar to a silk screen, that the master is applied to. In the case of the RP3700, the machine which I was using, there is only space for one drum, meaning only one layer of colour can be printed at a time. To create an image with multiple colours requires the original image to be divided into colour layers and each of these layers to be scanned in separately. Between each layer of colour the drum is changed and a different master is created, resulting in a multi-layered, multi-coloured final print.

There is a relatively broad range of colours available for Risograph printing, although typically a studio will only keep four to six drums at a time due to cost. However, this does not necessarily limit the user - as with any printer, the colour can be printed at any shade by increasing or decreasing the density on the original print, which can help to maximise the appearance of only one or a few colours.

An example of one-colour printing - Alicia Nauta, Untitled, 2011

Aside from this, one of the most attractive and sought after features of the Risograph is its ability to mix colours. Even when printing at full density, the inks retain a certain translucent quality, allowing certain colours to be overlaid to create a multitude of new colours. For example, red and yellow can be overlaid to make a shade of orange, as can yellow and pink; red and blue can make purple, and yellow and green make a shade of teal.

A simple but effective example of a two-colour print - printed by Risosaurus, Sheffield

A multi-layered print using a large range of colours - Zoo Flask, Sister Arrow

A highly complex image made using only three colours (yellow, red and blue) -

detail of Wedges and Ledges, Rich de Courcy

I often find myself returning to the Risograph printing style within my work because I find it to be one of the most manual forms of digital printing, and it contains an unseen flexibility that brings whole new elements to the creative process. Printing with a Risograph provides many freedoms that are lost when using other forms of production as it allows for changes and alterations at every stage of the work. Using this printing technique is very much a process of building every page from the ground up - for every layer that is applied, changes can be made, colours can be edited, elements can be added or removed, and the slightest change can alter the entire tone of the piece. The element of play is hugely important during this printing process, and experimentation and accidental mistakes can improve work in surprising ways.

There are only a few minor technical limitations when printing on a Risograph: the maximum size a Risograph can print is A3, and the minimum is A4. It is not possible to print full bleed as there will always be a 5mm boarder at the edge of the page. However a print can always be trimmed down to any size and can appear full bleed on a smaller paper size. It is also not possible to print with 100% ink density using only one colour across a full page, as the area will not print evenly and heavy ink saturation causes internal jams. It is possible to print double sided on a Risograph, but exact alignment is often tricky and drag marks often occur as the paper passes through the machine due to over-saturation.

Risograph's also happen to be a very environmentally friendly way of mass producing prints as the machines use soy based inks and the masters are made from banana leaf product, and the technology is also highly reliable compared to a standard photocopier, achieving both very high speed (typically 130 pages per minute) and very low costs. The general lifespan for a risograph involves making 100,000 masters and 5,000,000 copies.

Front dials showing that this RP3700 has printed 2,201,822 copies

and created 7,441 masters in its lifetime (an old boy really)