EQUIP - Footprint Risopgraph Visit

EQUIP - Footprint Risopgraph Visit

With initial intentions of curating a Risograph exhibition and purchasing a printer we organised a visit to Footprint printers in Leeds, it was interesting to have a run through of the process and a few limitations where cleared up, these mainly been; 

Paper stock limitations in terms of what weights the machine can take.

Colour options, a few nice metallic and neon options are available but part of the recognisable aesthetic is the limited set colour palette available. 

What was interesting was learning how the prints masters where made, much like screen printing these negatives where made by burning the image onto the master drum allowing ink to be pushed through it like the screen print process. What was interesting and appealed to me and joe was how these masters could be created, they could be passed through indesign or pdf files through a computer but could also be scanned in, much like the lightbox process involved with screen printing. And this is where the initial high costs come, prints after this negative is made work out very cheap in huge volumes. And this is what changes the realism of the exhibition as we would want a number of entrants using 2 colours and each colour requiring its own negative costs would add up to around £600 - 700 for 40 - 50 2 colour A3 prints. 

A full A4 or A3 area can not be covered, theres around a 5mm - 3mm bleed required, trying to print past this causes paper jams. 

The final aesthetic has a very characteristic screen print look, a traditional print method. But the outcome is create using developed technology, a perfect link to EQUIPs manifesto of using traditional & technological process's.