Bubblegum cinema has two strong concepts in it: the first is risograph, and the second 80s and 90s bubblegum stickers.
In spain, bubblegum brands like Sonrics, Bazooka and Dunkin offers a tiny sticker wrapped in the envelopment and over the gum. Those stickers has rounded corners in most cases, and has some misprintings, little errors in its halftone printing. And is this last point is when we meet risography.
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| Tiny Skeletor bubblegum sticker from He-Man y los Masters Del Universo. Edited in 1990 by JAKE. |
Risography is a brand of digital duplicators manufactured by the Riso Kagaku Corporation, that are designed mainly for high-volume photocopying and printing. Risographs have typically had interchangeable colour inks and drums allowing for printing in different colours or using spot colour in one print job; just one color per pass.
Riso in now is in-vogue again due to the nostalgia feeling that awake in all of us, and this is in part for its imperfect printing.
Step by Step:
1. All starts when ink stains the paper after a rough pencil sketch. Then I scanned it and cleaned the lineart in Adobe Photoshop.
2. Photoshop time. I just use two colors, indigo blue and bubblegum pink, so I use a clipping mask over the lineart and colored the lines in this two colors. When I finished this step I pressed Ctrl+E to merge layers, and then selected the colors in order to separate them in two different layers.
3. The next step was color the figure in the same blue and pink in different layers. I adjusted opacity in both layers and added some gaussian noise to it. Then I merged pink tones with the pink.
4. I hid blue layers and print just the pink ones. Later I print blue layers over the pink-printed sheets. As results we had some kind of multiply layer effect. The paper, in some cases moves a bit, and recreate perfectly the riso/old offset printings imperfections.
5. In some cases the printing errors were so grotesques that we had to discard them.
6. The last step was cut all the sheets, sort them, staple, fold, and cut some imperfections. I repeated the same steps printing the covers, printed in a thick paper.
Do you want your copy? I just made 15 copies in this first printing, so buy yours now clicking here.