For my risograph animation, I eventually landed on working with a gif i had made from a particle system i coded while taking ‘the nature of code’ two semesters ago. I love the swarming effect, and the way the particles move together.

After organizing my contact sheets, the automation of which amazed me to see photoshop moving without my input, I started to consider colors. I had come in with my friend who is very well-versed in riso and prints her illustrations often, so she had some really helpful guidance for me.

First, I inverted the animation, and created another contact sheet with the inverted frames. Using both of these versions on top of eachother, I masked the colorspaces to see what different combinations would look like.

I decided on the federal blue and florescent orange combination. I increased the brightness on both files prior to printing to make sure there would be some white space, because I liked the depth that gave to the composition. Then, I printed out the orange layer followed by the blue layer. I had some difficulty getting the blue ink to lay well, but it worked well enough eventually.

In class I struggled to get the alignment to be consistent with the automated system, so I manually separated each frame and processed them into order and then sequenced them in after effects.

risoOut.mp4

The scanned version was a bit washed out, so in the I overlaid another copy with Multiply blend mode to give the vibrancy I wanted.