Small Project. Allotment. Riso Poster

I have spoken to the contact at the school allotment about creating an information zine to give out to visitors and also a workshop zine for the pupils to use. I had a session booked in for the Riso but the information to go onto the zines had not been finalised so I decided to make a poster. I thought this would be helpful for me to go over the process of printing on the Riso again and refresh my memory but to also try out the papers I had bought, see if these are suitable and to also look at colour overlays and choices.

The school have been using and were keen to use the phrase,

When it rains, look for rainbows

so I wanted to incorporate that phrase into the print

I've used Futura for the phrase as I thought this was a clear but stylish font in which the children will be able to read easily and it looks modern and clean.

At first I printed out the text at 100% opacity black, with bitmap circles behind, to give the background some interest, but it overpowered the rest of the design and I wanted the drawn images to be very impactful within the composition.

The second attempt had a lighter opacity fill on the text and was mixed on each line to give it interest, with a darker tone and focus on the word, rainbows

The children's images were then designed as a second Riso layer to be printed in a different colour. I scaled the images so that the detail would be visible on an A3 print and the bitmapped circles would play nicely with the scale of the drawings.

Heres the design on the Riso rollers..

You can see where the colour from the first drum has transferred onto this, the second, blue drum and the registration changes that have also happened

I chose lots of different colours and stocks of paper to print onto to see how they changed the print colours and look of the design. Heres a close up on red paper below, this colour really made the blue pop. The colours used were aqua blue and orange.

Printed on 310gsm recycled paper bought from a scrap store and 120gsm coloured paper stocks

Another close up of the print details..

The yellow paper really worked for both the design and the print colours chosen..

I plan to print this design again and strengthen the tone of the word FOR as I felt, especially on certain colours of paper it did not stand out enough and didn't balance with the other lines of text.

I plan to use the colours of paper which worked best with the two riso ink colours.