I wanted to find an animation that I already had in my library of photos, and I found some old GIFs I made while visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2018.
I found two that I liked—one of a jellyfish and the other of seaweed.
Still of jellyfish animation I created.
And because the assignment was to choose two colors for the riso print, I decided to go with the seaweed GIF because it was easier to discern two colors from the GIF, and it was visually more complicated which I thought could make an interesting print.
The original seaweed GIF that I decided to use for this assignment.
Thanks to the class with Kelli, I learned how to separate color channels of the animation in PS, and create contact sheets optimized for the riso printer.
On Wednesday I went to the printing lab, and thanks to the help of Yixun, I got some very abstract-looking prints which was pleasantly surprising.
I chose fluorescent orange and blue for the prints. While playing around with the color channels in PS, I realize that the yellow of the seaweed was closer to an orange color. When red was subtracted from the colors, the yellow and blue blended together and gave the whole composition a very artificial green color. During the class, Kelli mentioned that the fluorescent pink in the lab was closest to magenta in the CMYK color system. However, I didn’t want the print to be either too red or too yellow, so I decided to use the magenta color channel in grayscale, but print it in fluorescent orange instead of pink. Maybe next time I’ll try the yellow channel because I’m curious how different the print would look. I also manipulated the blue prints to look darker by combining the cyan and black channels.
One of my favorite orange prints.
I was very shocked when the first orange print came out, because it looked even more abstract and blurry than I expected. I was worried about the lines not being clear enough and adding the blue will turn it into a color mess, so Yixun recommended changing the printer settings to screen-covered instead of grain-touch. The screen-covered orange prints had noticeably clearer lines between the orange and the white paper, so we continued to use the screen-covered settings (note that we set 71 lpi for the blue and the highest for the orange).
With Frida the riso printer, the first few prints seemed to always be more vibrant than later prints. I thought the more vibrant orange prints would look better when the blue was added, but again I was surprised to find that I liked the lighter orange prints combined with the blue.
A darker orange print.
The darker orange print combined with blue.
Overall, it’s been a pleasant surprise playing around with the riso printer. I think the print still resembles seaweed, although it also is abstract enough that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I’m very happy with the light contrast in the prints, and how the colors turned out are very complementary.
All the prints done!
