Well, that’s it, I’m off college until the new year and I’m spending pretty much a lot of that time in Poland for Christmas with my girlfriend’s family, so I am not too sure how much work I am going to be able to do before I return… Hopefully a lot but I do feel apprehensive to say the least. I was in on Monday, which is just as well because I just, and I mean just, managed to get my A3 risograph print done. I spent a lot of Monday waiting for things to happen: waiting for the printer (the only working one in the entire building as the 2^nd one was out of order) which was a bit stressful; they really should get the other printer fixed because one printer is not enough for an entire building of students. When I wasn’t waiting for the printer so that I could print my master sheets for risograph printing, I was waiting for the actual risograph machine to create my prints. It all was a bit frustrating as I am not usually the most patient person, nevertheless, I did finally manage to get a series of Pollution Apocalypse prints made, and right now I am in Poland, so things could be worse.

Having only done risograph printing a couple of times before, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the experience, nor was I fully aware of how layering colours on the risograph machine worked, something I would sorely regret later. I had spent a lot of time meticulously separating the colours of my design onto different layers in Photoshop so that they would be ready to be printed using the risograph machine, which, as I have mentioned in previous posts, works in a similar fashion to screen printing, printing each colour one at a time. I thought that I had planned the whole print to the finest detail and happily numbered each layer in the order that they would go through the risograph machine. When it came to printing the first couple of layers, things seemed to be going well, black went through first, then green, then red, finally followed by purple; things were happening so quickly that I didn’t realise during the process that I had made a mistake that changed the design completely. I printed black first which, if it were screen-printing wouldn’t have mattered. Risograph, while extremely similar to screen printing, has it’s differences which I didn’t learn about until after the Pollution Apocalypse print was made… which meant that no colour would show over the top of it, meaning that all of the green highlights and details that I added to the polluted city and the Lovecraftian creatures were nowhere to be seen. I was absolutely devastated as soon as this happened, but after looking at the design for a while and receiving positive feedback from people that have seen it, I don’t think it looks bad, just different to how I envisioned it. At least this experience has shown me what not to do with riso, I definitely have a better understanding of how risograph printing works now and how to layer the colours in the future, should I ever choose to do risograph printing again.

All in all, this week definitely could have gone better, I should’ve researched how to layer risograph prints more and maybe done a few tests first before diving into the deep end, but, the end result wasn’t bad, so things could have gone worse too. I think at some point over the next month, I am going to do a bunch of risograph colour and layering tests to see what kind of effects I can achieve with risograph printing so that I am better equipped next time.

I’m really looking forward to my time out of England, and just hope that I am able to keep up with my work and prepare myself for the final print at the end of this project which is going to happen in early-to mid-January.