Riso Soup Pick & Mix 2021

After last year's success, we're very excited to share that Riso Soup Pick & Mix is back! 

A project for artists, designers and anybody who wants to have a go, we’re inviting you to design a two colour (layered) A4 Risograph print. The Riso Soup team will print them up and you’ll receive 20 Riso editions: 10 of your own design and 10 selected from the other submissions - hence Pick & Mix! New for this year, DCA will retain five copies of each design to be sold in our Shop - helping us to cover the costs of the project and keep participation free.

What is Riso?

Riso (rhymes with Miso) or Risography printing, is a wonderfully diverse and fun method of creating vivid and colourful artworks. Increasingly popular with artists and designers, these wonderful Japanese invented machines are incredibly easy to use, yet allow the user to create complex multi-layered graphic images.

Think of a Risograph printer as a screen-printing photocopier that creates detailed stencils on banana paper and prints soy oil inks. The word ‘Riso’ is Japanese for ‘ideal’ and these machines were designed to be a cheaper and more environmentally friendly method of printing large multiples of images than a Xerox machine. If you like making zines, artist publications or posters, Riso printing will open up a whole new world to you. DCA Print Studio has three of these amazing machines, with 11 different colours.

The Project Brief

• Design a two colour (layer) A4 Risograph print in portrait orientation.
• There is no theme and you can make your Riso print on any subject you want. Take a look at last year's Riso Soup Pick & Mix Gallery for some inspiration.
• Choose two colours from the colour chart – when colours cross over you’ll create a third colour, so choose wisely! For example, red over blue will make purple.
  
  
• The two layers of your design must be greyscaled and submitted as two jpegs of no more than 150dpi. Riso print mimics the range of tones in the original black and white designs. It is possible to have multiple tones of your chosen colour in one layer. When another layer is printed on top, which is again made up of various tones of a different colour, you will create a range of tones in a third colour.
• If you’d like to submit work in traditional drawing, painting or collage, that’s absolutely fine: you’ll just need to scan in your handmade layers or take a good quality photo to submit.
• Label your layers in the colour you want them to be printed in. For example, 'Pink Layer.jpeg' and 'Teal Layer.jpeg'.
  
• Then submit your two layers (as jpegs) along with the title of your print, name and postal address by email to printstudio@dca.org.uk. Please ensure you put the subject of your email as Riso Soup Submission. 

The Riso Soup team will then start printing your editions. Once they are completed, the team will be in touch to say they’ll be ready to collect or they’ll be sent to you through the post if you are based further afield. We will accept submissions on a first come first served system with a cap of 30 submissions, so don’t delay in submitting your work if you want to take part. 

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch by emailing printstudio@dca.org.uk with the subject line Riso Soup Enquiry.