It's Gonna Take A Lot of Love to Change the Way Things Are
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It's Gonna Take A Lot of Love to Change the Way Things Are 〰️
One of my New Year goals this 2026 was to try the wonderfully fun Risograph.
I was able to book a workshop at the amazing Melon Press STL.
First Things First
Sophia and Dan, the lovely people behind Melon Press, hold these cute workshops here in St. Louis every once in a while. I was fortunate enough to be able to sign up for one of them! Leaving his workshop you got to take home 25, 11×17 two color prints and it lasted from about
12pm - 5pm.
I went into this workshop somewhat knowing what risograph was and was pleasantly surprised to see how similar it is to printmaking – one of my favorite classes I took in college and almost switched majors because of it. We started with a brief lesson in what Risographing was, where it started, and why people are using it more now than ever.
We started with a small demo then took out our sketchbooks and got to work! I didn’t have a design coming into this but I did have a quote from a song that is very relevant to what’s been going on lately with the world. Thus the sketching commenced!
Two Color Print
After sketching we received TWO pieces of paper ( 11 x 17 regular or tracing paper) to transfer our sketches on to. This is where I started to really love the process. Because this was only a two color print we would have to utilize the opacity of the material we were working with. There are so many other ways to use the risograph technique, like collage or even digital but I went with some alcohol markers. The picture here is a cheat sheet with the different colors of markers and the registration amount after a run through the machine. For the darker red of the apple I went with the Stormy Night Marker and Storm Grey for the Blue.
Tres Trace Trace
Then I got to work! There was some reasoning on why I had decided to split my prints the way I did. I was hoping to get an extra 25 prints for my snail mail club but it did make the process a bit more tedious and I wouldn’t recommend doing that for your first time if you ever try it. I thought that some of the marker lines I made on the peel were GORGEOUS but they didn’t show on the final print but that’s okay, it truly was just a happy accident! The apple and peel was on one tracing paper and that would be the red run and the quote on the separate paper would be the blue run.
The first run was this bright red and it was super cool to watch the paper shoot out of the risograph.
The Print Run
That was it! Obviously, I could totally go more in depth about the process and how it all works but I think I would be doing it a disservice with the lack of knowledge I have. Huge thank you to Melon Press STL for letting people get into the studio to learn and try this stuff out. I cannot wait to come back and do it all again sooner rather than later!
The second run was this soft and beautiful cornflower blue.