About Riso
What is Riso? Basically it's a screen printing process within a giant copy machine, making it super easy to create beautiful, full color prints by layering one color at a time.
Riso is a company from Japan that artists started working with because of its nice textures, bright colors, ease of use, and environmentally friendly promotion. Riso is marketed as a low energy, environmentally friendly printer using soy-based or natural inks and is primarily used for schools, churches and businesses. Artists started using Riso regularly in the early 00's to print their art books and comics, and now Riso has heralded in a print renaissance with an explosion of self published work!
Riso is a fast, fun, but imperfect style of printing that allows creators to efficiently create vibrant, textured prints, no matter the subject. Prints are made by layering one color at a time, similar to screen printing, to build up a full color image, but not all prints come out perfectly. Sometimes there's slight misregistration that makes each print unique, although only the most well registered prints get to my shelves. The prints that aren't quite up to standards or were tests become backs of business cards and get put into a pile to make new 'bad print' sets. I hate wasting paper so I look for fun ways to reuse prints and make them into something even more special.
In my studio I have access to nine Riso ink colors: fluorescent pink, yellow, blue, federal blue, kelly green, orchid, aqua, fluorescent orange and scarlet red. Lately I've been mainly using three colors to create a faux CMYK effect with different colors. Riso inks mix well and I kind of paint with the colors to make full colored prints out of just a few options. One of my favorite parts of the Riso is seeing the results of printing one ink color on top of another color on the paper to get new colors and palettes.
Environmentally friendly ~ The way Riso is able to layer colors so well is because of a combination of the natural oil inks that are specific to Riso as well as the random dot generation in the screens (or Masters) that the ink is pushed through onto the paper. The archival inks are ecologically responsible by reducing waste and CO2 in the manufacturing process and the Masters are made out of natural fibers as well! Another special thing about Riso is that there's no heat process involved, so it's a very energy efficient way of printing. All around Riso is a pretty great alternative to traditional copy printing, as it's more environmentally friendly on several fronts.
There is so much that Riso opens up and makes possible for artists to use as an art form. It makes replicating and distributing artwork easy, and creates satisfying textures and colors that are rare for digital printing. It's also easy to use! With step by step instructions printed on the machine, it's very accessible to anyone new to printmaking and using a copy machine.
Natalie + Riso ~ Natalie has been working with various Riso machines since 2013. She's worked on friends' machines, in community spaces like the SVA RisoLAB, and Handsaw Press, and now on her own EZ 590U in her studio in Los Angeles. She was an Artist in Residence at the SVA RisoLAB in 2016 and attended a residency in Kofu, Japan in 2019 creating a new body of Riso printed work with ink colors unaccessible in the US.
She likes to share her love of Riso in workshops and demos around the world and she's made a 5 hour long online workshop where she discusses everything Riso with Gallery Nucleus that you can check out here.
In Spring 2024, she taught a week-long Riso workshop in Denmark at VIA University and regularly hosts workshops in other cities with Riso friends. She sometimes teaches live workshops out of her studio in Atwater Village, LA.
Follow her work on social media or patreon for updates on new Riso work and workshops! Natalie's new art book Dreaming in Color has a big section on Riso too! Link to the PREORDER is here, shipping in October!
