Animals in Space is one of my favourite things I’ve created so far. It’s actually my very first zine and riso project in one!
I got introduced to the Riso printing machine by a friend who printed book covers for a school project in the local culture centre. I really wanted to indulge in the technique of riso printing and did a lot of research through books and various blogs. New things like this always get me hooked and really excited about creating new things. The idea of doing something with riso quickly tied with my long time idea of making a zine with the A3 to A6 Zine folding technique.
I knew I wanted to do something about dogs, and after a quick google about famous dogs, I stumbled upon Laika the widely known space dog. It was perfect and fit my colour palette of pink and blue wonderfully. Through Wikipedia, I found all the other, also lesser known animals and the rockets they were sent to space with. Although it’s quite a sad topic I wanted to pay tribute to the sweet animal cosmonauts by making an informative zine.
I always sketch on paper with pencil before I start my work, when working on a zine I usually work directly onto a mockup. It helps me a lot to imagine the size of my work in print later on.
All of the colour shades were drawn as black layers by hand and then edited and compiled into one file digitally as a master for the risograph. Each colour has it’s own A3 master copy in different opacity layers of black which, when printed with a colour and overlayed with another will mix into different shades. all grey tones are rasterized since riso works similarly to screen-printing and results in this cool dot grid.
I’m really happy with the outcome of the zine! It’s also available for purchase in my Etsy store.
