Illustrator Mandy Finke has spent the last month experimenting with translating some of her more “painterly” illustrations into Risograph prints. Instead of using the normal kind of file setup, she turned her drawings into fake CMYK. Mandy’s illustrations cover subjects including people, nature, folklore, food, travel, and the built environment around us. Interested in trying out digital drawing and painting, somewhere in her late twenties she purchased an Ipad pro, and has been experimenting with colour and a more painterly approach ever since, revelling in the ease of working digitally.
Mandy has been working with the Risograph printer for the past few years. She tells us; “After working digitally for many years I really missed having physical copies of my work and discovered a local Risograph studio while exploring options of how I could print my work.” She continues; “I enjoy the process of translating my artwork into the vibrant colours you get from the machine, and the learning what does and doesn’t work in setting up my files.” However, based on how file preparation for Risograph printing works, and that it can be “quite a hassle” to print many layers of different colours, Mandy felt somewhat limited in what kind of artwork she could print with this medium.
While she has a deep love for black / greyscale ink-type drawings, Mandy also enjoys intuitively drawing and painting digitally. She comments; “The fact that you have basically an unlimited amount of colours to choose from in Procreate is one of my favourite things about it, and I love to blend / smudge many shades together without consciously thinking about what I’m doing. I don’t like planning ahead about how I want to colour something and separating it into different layers the way that would make sense for Riso printing.”
After hearing that her local Riso studio had a Faux-CMYK workshop that was aimed at photographers wanting to translate their photographs into Riso, Mandy became fascinated with the concept. She states; “I was really interested in this technique, but not for my photography, but my more intuitively painted artwork. If it works for photographs then it should work for illustrations as well, right? I was really hoping that this CMYK process could be a new way for me to print art prints that are painted more freely instead of specifically designed for Riso, so I could find a bit more liberty for intuitive exploration when I draw.” Thus, Mandy booked on last minute at the workshop, and her period of experimentation began!
Mandy headed to the workshop with a couple of drawing concepts already in mind. She says; “Since I wanted to create something with many shades with only slight variations it would have taken me forever to prep these digital files… I decided to go with an illustration that would include a very wide range of colours and shades, just to see what the “faux-CMYK” could do and which colours it could nicely recreate”. The initial illustration was digitally painted in Procreate, using her favourite painterly brushes that blend colours together nicely. “I like painting with a colour and then intuitively move up or down on the colour wheel to a warmer or colder tone and blend them together,” describes the illustrator. Once the digital drawing was finished Mandy exported it as a PDF and opened it on the laptop with Photoshop where there’s a function to see the separate CMYK channels of an image. She exported those as separate layers and fine-tuned the files to create her masters for the Riso drums. The final piece was printed with 4 colours (aqua, fluorescent pink, yellow, and black), with the screen-covered setting which creates classic halftone patterns.
Telling us more about the challenges she faced throughout the project Mandy states; “The process of this project was actually surprisingly successful. I had to complete the illustration in a very limited time-frame, in order to finish it on time for the 2-week workshop… So the initial time-crunch was probably the most challenging part.” Mandy is looking forward to continuing to use this new technique to make prints in a more liberal manner.
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