Blue Ink Fever Day
A full-on riso obsession day—blue ink, trial prints, and a growing urge to make more colorful work.
Today was one of those riso obsession is at full blast kind of days!
In the morning, I asked my husband to help me load a blue ink drum into the riso machine—something I’ve been wanting to try for a while now. Ever since I got pregnant, lifting heavy things sometimes makes my stomach hurt, so I’ve fully embraced my personal strategy: just ask for help when I need it!
Actually, yesterday was the opening reception for the First Annual Chicago and Vicinity Riso Exhibition organized by Spudnik Press. Both my husband and I have work in the show, so I really wanted to go—but I wasn’t feeling well, so I had to sit it out and let him go without me.
He took photos though, and wow—every piece looked amazing. Seeing them sparked something in me, and since yesterday I’ve had this growing urge to make more colorful work.
Also, we have several ink drums at home that haven’t been behaving well because of the cold winter—the ink gets stubborn and doesn’t flow nicely. So I thought, why not use this as an excuse to do some maintenance and make art at the same time? My plan: print something using just one color each day.
Today’s color: blue!
On the left is print #1—the weird square shows up right on the big cherry’s face! And on the right is #2—the square is gone, but now the little cherry’s face is cut off!!
I printed about 20 sheets in “confidential mode” first, then tried full-on solid blue prints. I also quickly made some grumpy cherry brothers in Illustrator and printed those too.
There were a couple of things that didn’t go well, so I’m leaving notes here for my future self:
① A mysterious white square showed up in a gradient illustration I made in Illustrator (even though it wasn’t there originally!)
→ Illustrator → Object tab → Flatten Transparency → set Raster/Vector Balance to 100
② While printing the second file, the ink suddenly stopped coming out on about 1 inch of the left side
→ Remove the ink bottle, push it back in until it clicks, and keep printing repeatedly
(For me, going into test mode and printing slowly works best!)
Also, this is more of an ongoing personal challenge, but I want to create a swatch chart from 10% to 100% ink density. I’ll use it as a reference when making future riso data. And most importantly—I want to finally make a proper color swatch chart of all the inks we have in our studio!