Before/After

After handing in my BA thesis and having held the presentation about my work, I became a bit sloppy about my blog. Partly because I had a lot of stress (postponing the journey to south-east Asia, moving out of my room,...) and partly because I have to share my laptop with my darling at the moment. Last night, I made him sleep so late that now it's my chance to use my laptop including the massive screen! Which we borrowed from one of our flatmates. WOW that's fun. 

I'm ready for a major update! Unusual: I was clever enough to take some process pictures while making the picture book called Ziki. I hope you enjoy!

This is where the colour magic happened! At the wonderful 
Bureau D.O.C.H., I used the Risograph to print my (up to 
then greyscale) drawings. I decided to print the book using 
3 colours: a nice and juicy green, orange, and brown as 
contrast colour for the lineart and darker parts.

This is what it looked like when the weeks-long printing 
process was almost finished. You can see the variety of 
different saturations which makes it look like more than
 just three colours! Amazing, right? Using the Risograph, 
you can choose from different saturations as well as three
 different screen grids. This is why I started using photo-
graphs in some parts, e.g. the moon on the top right.

One of the prints. It's Mr Schneider, the furious maths teacher
 spitting on Ziki. Haha! Poor goat! See how the colours (especially
 the brown filling colour) doesn't match the lineart 100%. 
This is because for every colour, you put the so far printed 
piece of paper in the Risograph again. So there is never a 
guarantee for a super accurate print. I like this aesthetics 
of something handmade. It's a bit like the effect you get while 
silkscreen printing. Also, it worked with the story so well.

Mr Schneider again! But, as you can see, I added a rasterized 
wallpaper to the background. I wanted that guy's living 
room to look old-fashioned and tasteless.

I was so relieved when the whole printing part was done that I 
took loads and loads of photos of the stack of  pages, haha!

Next came the binding. I decided to make an 
adhesive binding. It worked with the paper really 
well (although the book is quite slim) and I 
wanted to have a nice cardboard cover. 
On this picture you can see how I pressed it 
after glueing.

I still needed a cover! I used thick cardboard which had a 
natural colour to it. I silkscreen printed it because the 
cardboard would have been way too thick for the Risograph.

Next step: Binding the he ready bound pages including the 
peach coloured endpaper and the cover.

The materials I used.

Two more photos of the finished book, ready to dry 
under pressure... Note the silly word play, as I didn't have 
much time left.

In fact, I had never used this binding technique 
before. Still, it was so much fun that I bound three 
little publications which I showed at my exhibition 
one week later.

Little invitation illustration for my exhibition/presentation 
("Werkschau").

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PS: Google Chrome doesn't seem to know the word "blog" and suggests me to change it into "glob"!