About Me

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Sydney, NSW, Australia
I'm an arts management worker/ artist/ designer. I work at Accessible Arts in administration and bookkeeping, but also work on various freelance activities from photography to graphic design. I'm Associate Partner at the ARI, the Big Fag Press, board member of Runway Australian Experimental Art and occasionally work at Bailey and Yang Consultants. My creative work has often been driven by social issues and commentary. This blog started as a way of documenting research for my honours year at uni, which I have continued, in order to gather inspiration for future artistic practice.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Printing on the Rizz' and other Printing Collectives

Last year in May, the Rizzeria (which is a fellow printing collective of the Big Fag) set up residence at the Paper Mill at Angel Place in the city. The Rizz' is smaller than the Big Fag, and it's a Stencil press, not an offset press. It has its own unique quality and works in a similar way with colour separating.

 
[Rizzeria flyer for its Open Printing Studio]
 
Lucas paid for me to do a small workshop on the Rizz' on making "zines", so I colour separated and put together a few old photographs and digital work for a makeshift 'zine.

This is what I mean by colour separation:


The right image printed in black and the left image printed in red ended up like this (I like how the minor mis-registration of the hat creates an interesting 3D effect):


I printed on two different kinds of paper, and used a 'zine making template the volunteers at the Rizz' gave me. It was a fairly standard and easy to use template, but there are many templates out there, you just have to find them or even create your own, I've seen interesting ones that even fold out into a spiral.


 My 'zine was printed like this on both sides (so it can flip inside out) using teal, black and red. It ended up looking like this:




Another printing collective called Blood and Thunder exists, use a machine similar to the Rizzeria, except I believe it can print two colours at the same time. Mickie Quick works both at Blood and Thunder and The Big Fag Press.

Here are some images of the Blood and Thunder press (as you can see compared to the Big Fag, it's tiny!!):



*Blood & Thunder images taken from theblackmail.com.au.

We printed our Green Bans Art Walk flyer on Blood and Thunder:


Craig Kernow who works at Blood and Thunder (I haven't met him I've just seen a lot of these examples), has a signature technique where he colour separates a black and white image into approximately 50% another colour and tweaks around with the overlay in Photoshop. It produces a beautiful effect:

 *Image scanned from Performance Space's Publication POINT #3 April/ May 2011.

 I tried to replicate the effect on the Rizz' here but I don't think I've quite got the technique down. If I ever meet Kernow, I'll be sure to ask him, but a magician may not reveal his secrets!


*All images are my scanned artworks or artworks in progress unless expressely mentioned.

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