Risograph printing can be done in a variety of colours, and the colours available for the project at Footprint were black, red, green, yellow, blue, orange and fluorescent pink.
Limited options for colours required the colour combinations to be carefully considered. Working with these colours the group decided on using red and blue, as these colours are both strong enough to be used individually when printing work and can also be overlaid to create purple, adding an third potential colour. When combined, the purple is also dark enough to act as a Key colour, similar to the effect that the colour black has within CMYK separations. This will allow photographic images to retain the depth needed to create a clear print.
Submissions for issue 1 were taken over the course of two weeks and resulted in over 65 artists submitting to the project. 26 of these were selected for print, however a large majority of these submissions were not designed for the printing specifications of a risograph printer and so had to be edited by the group. Each submission was required to be formatted to greyscale and then separated into one or two colour separations. This was either done by manually selecting areas of the work to separate or through editing the colour channels on Photoshop. Example is below:
Work submitted by illustrator Ben Thompson
Colour separations showing red separation (top)
and blue separation (bottom)
Example 2
Original typographic work submitted by Fine Artist Scarlett Hirst
Colour separations showing blue separation (top) and red separation (bottom)
Mock up of both blue and red layers overlaid when printed