User:Anouschka

NEW SKILL TRYOUT: THE RISOGRAPH

There is this shop in Nijmegen called Extrapool and and I cant help but stop and stare whenever I walk by its windows. My thoughts usually go like this: Wauw I love this i need this give this to me. Seriously. What is this magic making machine. It’s the risograph. And i’m gonna get to know it. I thought it’d be nice if i introduced myself.

this already feels so cool! I drew a drawing, put it the machine and pressed on print. The lines seemed a bit shy but by adjusting the contrast it really looked like something. So that is done. The next thing to print is an illustrator document I prepared. The printing station assistent said it couldn’t be printed it in the state it is in right now. :( These where the documents:

jpgs will follow

I’ll take care of them later. Let’s make something else then.

I took this rock & roll picture that i found on the facebook of a friend. They form a band in Nijmegen and I really liked its esthetics. Photo’s are easy to divide by colour if at least you know how to handle them in photoshop, I learned. Also: the picture wasn’t allowed to be too close to the edges unfortunately because, they told me, the entire page would become sticky and get stuck in the machine. Following the orders of the assistent I started printing with cyaan, yellow, blue and black.

First this

Then this

Then this

All of those pics looked absolutely badass to me. I was getting a sense of how the machine works and I started to think of all the possibilities it could give me. I wanted more! But first i had the silly task of preparing all the layers in black and white in my illustrator document (remember). I had to convert all my colors by hand into a black and white scale (0% to 100%) and then divide them between one of the four colors, cyaan yellow blue and black. I’dd guess that that would take up to two hours and wouldn’t be that accurate. I felt so disappointed the moment he told me that this files had still to be worked on so much. Especially since I already had put so much time into them. But then i remembered I just learned how to divide colors into four chunks with photoshop, so i turned my .ai document into a .jpg document en put it in photoshop to try my newly learned psd technique. And that, my friends, is how i saved myself 2 hours of .ai struggling.

These are the results: results will follow

Although I am not disappointed, i’m not 100% satisfied by the results. I made the design in illustrator and somehow it lacks of dynamic once its printed. Even though it worked as long as it was on the screen.

To be continued. As for now, here are some pieces of thought about making stuff: What i already experience is something that I already know from myself. I use to get a lot of ideas that get bigger and bigger and bigger. And the bigger the idea gets, the more I have the idea that i’m ready to get started. But then when I actually get started I notice that a lot of my ideas are either not suitable or impossible to perform with the little knowledge that i have from the medium. This is something that I know about myself in the back of my mind but it’s good that i finally write it down now. My original idea for this course was to make prints following my brothers instructions. Why? He is 13 years old and has a thing for building altars. He gathers all kinds of stuff and images and then puts it in a place and no-one is allowed to touch it. He would get really mad if he suspected that anyone would have touched his altar. Big mystery to the rest of the family. But my brother refuses to explain. However, he told me he would be fine building this altar with me. Great! I thought initially. But I don’t know any of the printing techniques yet. So it would be an impossible to realize project in the time and space that i have right now. I don’t even know how it exactly would fit in the studio practice/presentation. I’m keeping this project in the back of my mind. But for now I am really eager to get to know the risograph in this way and do step-by-step what is more or less expected from me.