Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing series for Arts Access examining the health and well-being of our North Texas arts economy.
At Pegasus Tattoo Studios in Oak Cliff, tattoo artist Kristin Wright sits in her little corner of the shop. Her station is filled with illustrations, such as tattoo stencils, but also bold, vibrantly colored prints, zines and brochures. These prints all have a similar unpolished, vintage look, like a digital screenprint. A look made possible by a risograph printer.
“I usually describe it to people as like artists pimping out big copier machines,” Wright, who is also the co-owner of Soft Spots Risograph Press, said. “These machines were not intended for artists, they were made for producing really efficiently and being a little bit nicer to the environment.”
Riso printers look like photocopiers but work like screen printers. Wright said some artists are gravitating toward risograph because it allows them to print their artwork without breaking the bank.
“The equipment can be a lot cheaper and a lot more sustainable than your typical printers that would use ink cartridges,” Wright said. “Our ink lasts a really long time, and comes in these tubes, and a lot of the time we use recycled paper.”
Soft Spots is one of a few riso printing presses in North Texas. Wright and co-founder Gino Dal Cin have been running Soft Spots for a year. In December, they opened their studio in the Design District after operating from their home kitchen.
“I think what draws most people into riso is, first, the color palette, which is gorgeous and all the colors mix together really well,” Wright said. “But, there’s something about the texture of it.”
Wright said the first time she started printing riso, she printed all kinds of illustrations she made, even the ones she didn’t like. She said she put everything through the machine and saw that even her least favorite works turned out beautiful. She compared the experience to working in a darkroom and seeing photographs as prints for the first time.
“You shouldn’t see your art only posted on Instagram, there’s another dimension to it when it is physical,” Wright said. “I’m just kind of hooked on making physical work for everybody, like you can touch it and I feel like that’s what makes it even better.”
A year before Soft Spots opened, Jacob Vasquez and Allison Belcher founded Dallas-based Play Nice Press as a way to collaborate with local artists during the pandemic.
Belcher said riso printers, like silk-screens, use a stencil technique to print the ink onto paper.
The riso printer creates stencils, or masters, inside the machine. The stencil is then wrapped around the ink drum, or the ink cartridge. When the paper is fed flat through the machine, it passes under the rotating drum. Since riso prints each color at a time, color drums need to be switched out and the paper needs to go through the press again until each color is transferred.
“All of our paper is uncoated because it has to be in order to accept the oil-based ink into the fibers of the paper,” Vasquez said. “It’s definitely a much cheaper alternative for the quantity that you get.”
The ink is bound with rice bran oil or soybean oil, which is why the color pigments are so vivid. The ink comes in big plastic tubes that can also be recycled, unlike laser printer ink cartridges. Play Nice uses recycled paper when they can or paper they purchase at Pegasus Creative Reuse, an art supply thrift store in Oak Cliff.
“Sustainability is to extend the life cycle,” Vasquez said. “Now we can make prints that hopefully someone will keep forever on paper that already existed.”
On top of being more sustainable, Riso presses can also be more affordable. These North Texas riso presses can charge about $1 per print or impression. At an office supply store, a similar print could cost up to $3. Some shops even have ways to print an artist’s work without charging them a thing.
Play Nice will sometimes give artists an option to publish their work through them at zero cost. Play Nice will print several copies of the artist’s work and then give the artist a portion of the copies. Play Nice will keep the rest. Both Play Nice and the artist can then sell their copies freely.
Soft Spots also hosts a riso club, a meet-up where artists can print a limited set of their work for free as long as they make a donation. The artists can bring their own paper or snacks as well.
Wright said the most expensive part about riso is stocking up on colors and having a color palette, but that’s why she wants Soft Spots to be public and accessible to everyone.
A riso printer can start off at about $2,000. Ink can cost between $40 to $65 per tube, but each color tube needs its own drum. Drums can cost about $1,000 each. A master roll can be somewhere between $60 to $80.
“If there are only two of us using it, there would be no reason for us to have 10 colors,” Wright said. “But if 100 people were using it, we might as well have 20 colors, they’re going to be used all the time, they’re going to be taken care of.”
That’s why Wright said anyone who is interested in riso should work with the riso presses that already exist.
“If anything, [riso] should just be more accessible because the more that they’re used, the better the maintenance is as well,” Wright said. “They’re not going to dry up as quickly, the ink will last longer, it doesn’t affect your shelf life, so I feel like the key is to have them being used regularly.”
One of the longest-running riso presses in North Texas is Strange Powers Press, which was founded by Mylan Nguyen and Taro Waggoner in 2015. The married couple owns a RISO GR3770, which scans images from the top of the machine like a Xerox printer . They operate from the same studio as Play Nice in Dallas.
“We don’t run it like a traditional printing press,” Nguyen said. “The riso for us has always been more about working on our own art practice and building community with other artist friends that we already know.”
Strange Powers engages with the community through residencies and hosting risograph workshops around North Texas, where they teach students about the history of riso and printing practices.
“Running the machine we run, we don’t feel confident taking orders from everyone because some people are very perfectionist and it’s the imperfections that we like about it,’ Nguyen said. “We have these things, we call them lightning marks, it’s kind of how the master gets folded and leaves a lightning kind of gap in the color sometimes, and some people would be like, ‘This is wrong.’ ”
Stephanie Sanz, an Oak Cliff-based painter and muralist who goes by SM Sanz, said she had her artwork printed in riso for the first time through Strange Powers. She said she had been looking for an alternative way to print her work, and although she liked screen printing it’s just not always accessible. She said printing through riso was more cost effective and fast, especially when trying to print up to five different artworks before selling at a market.
“It just makes your work more accessible, too.” Sanz said. “It’s not everyday that someone can buy a painting or commission a mural.”
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