Colour Riso Printing

We get quite excited about colour riso printing and it would be really nice to print more using this process which is why we’re writing this page to tell you how you can add a splash of colour to your work without the expense of full colour laser printing.

 

How the process works

The riso printer works similarly to a screen printing. Ink is pushed through holes in a thin master sheet that wraps around a colour drum. You have to use a different colour drum for each of the colours you use.

We have four colour drums: black, red, green and blue. We can’t print any other colours with the riso. And we can only print your work in the specific shades of ink that we use - see the image to the right of the page.

We can only print one colour at a time. If you are using more than one colour, the paper will go through the machine once for each colour. There can be some issues with getting the two colours to line up correctly, as each image can shift on the page by a couple of millimetres.

Some designs are more difficult than others in this respect. For example trying to put a black outline around a colour graphic is next to impossible since both images will shift around the page slightly.

 

Designs that work well

You can print your design in coloured
ink rather than black.

 

 

Or you can combine two on more colours to create interesting effects.

 

It works well to use colour as a wash to create an eye-catching splash of colour behind black text.  This works especially well if you are using coloured paper or card.

 

 

 

 

Coloured paper also changes the colour of the ink - here the bright blue is made almost teal by the gold paper.

 

 

You could put graphics in colour accompanied by black text.

 

 

Or you could create graphics that do crazy and creative things with two or more colours.

This design uses all four of our colours.

 

 

How to send your work

 

You’ll need to send your work with the colours separated.

And each of the images needs to appear black – even if you are using a colour.

If you send your red graphic in red it will come out much paler than if you send it to us in black. Put the colour in the filename to help us get it right.

It also helps if you can send a graphic of what the final page will look like once printed with all the colours. But this is by no means essential.

   Red separation                           Black separation                                          Final product

Cost

 

Coloured ink is twice as expensive as black ink so the overall cost of your job will be higher if using coloured ink (though this is a small proportaion of the cost or printing). Multicoloured printing adds to the cost more significantly as each sheet has to be run through the machine once for each colour, so the time it takes increases and the cost of printing goes up accordingly.