PS → halftone → image → bitmap → 72/300 dpi → lines/diamonds

For the poster idea, I had some difficulty coming up with a political poster that uses a design system, based on generative art. I ended with flowers because I wanted the posters to still be aesthetic, and because all the original political poster ideas I had were very depressing. Finally, the criteria just came down to: Would I want this poster on my wall?

After a couple version, I was pretty satisfied with my code to generate petals and leaves in a semi-random way to make flowers. Originally, I had the flowers organized as vase → stems attached to the vase → leaves attached to stems → petals attached to stems → petal and leaf decorations attached to petals and leaves, respectively. Then I got rid of the vase completely and organized the flowers a bit more organically around the canvas.

First test print, with original design

I played around with using the p5.riso library but I couldn’t get the white outlined flowers to look the way I intended using the channel layer cutout utility. Instead, I downloaded the image files from p5 using saveImage() and split the color channels for printing in Photoshop.

One of the things I learned during this process was that to prepare a file for Riso printing, you should make sure that the colors I’m using will be as close to the Riso ink colors as possible. To do this, I changed the color palette in my p5 sketch to the matching Riso ink hex codes found in the p5.riso library.

Another thing I learned was that image files with a transparent background will be split as a black grayscale in Photoshop, and that’s why my first batch had color backgrounds instead of just leaving it as white. I honestly didn’t even realize this until after a day of looking at it. Yixun also taught me some neat tricks, like selecting similar colors in your channel file if it’s not the primary color, and lowering the transparency if you don’t want as much of this color to interfere with your primary color. Similarly, you can also reduce the transparency of the channel color to ~80% (it still looks fine when printed even if the PS file looks very light) to prevent printer jams.

Orange background from the yellow + pink printing

Dark background

Overall, I learned a lot more about printing with the Riso printer, and I feel more comfortable and knowledgable making my Riso prints now. It’s been a really fun experience seeing how different something on-screen turns out in Riso.

Nice white strokes outlined after yellow print

Very neat lines

In my final prints, I opted to stick with 2 colors, and skipped the black ink entirely. The black ink looked too strong in contrast to the lighter Riso colors.

With black ink

The final 4 posters I chose.

One of my favorite prints, even though there is some misaligned overprinting.

GIF of my code generating random flowers and text

GIF of my code generating random flowers and text