Greetings!

Hope you have all been enjoying a breezy summer. It has been a flurry of printing and animating since our last update and we’re excited to share a gale of information about our newest project -

We printed Zack’s newest risograph animation project, WIND, in collaboration with the good folks at TVPaint Animation. TVPaint has been Alex and Zack’s animation software of choice for over ten years! Both of us completed our college thesis films with TVPaint and it is still our favorite software to work with today. We’ve been using an animation to risograph pipeline using TVPaint and highly recommend checking it out if you’re on the lookout for a 2D animation program.

TVPaint asked Zack to create a short animation inspired by the five senses. Zack’s goal was to provoke the feeling of wind using sound and movement. Many have expressed that WIND reminds them of what it feels like to fly in a dream…

We did a lot of testing for this project to get the delicate balance of Mahogany, Sunflower, and Mint just right. Above, you’ll see that we started with pure Mint for the sky color, but we ended up adding a larger percentage of Sunflower to create a stormy green sky. We also edited the Mahogany layer to create more visible contrast between light and dark values and doubled up the line weight.

You may have noticed that we ended up using a horizontal format for these contact sheets, instead of our usual vertical format. We did this to maximize the size of the actual frames to get more detail in the prints. In our initial tests, we were losing some of the very fine details we were hoping to see in the final animation. Making the frames just slightly larger provided the information we were hoping to see.

20 pages of contact sheets from the WIND project, plus storyboards and technical info, have been compiled into a coil-bound book that you can purchase here. This is the largest book we’ve ever made and the most ambitious risograph animation project we’ve completed to-date!

Alex and Zack had the opportunity to share WIND at the Annecy Animation Festival in June. TVPaint graciously hosted us at their booth and we talked to a lot of people excited to see risograph animation! Maybe you’ll see a short risograph animated film from us at Annecy someday?

We have also been busy tabling at fests since our last update, including the Seattle Zine Fest, Hot Off the Press at Fantagraphics, and the Vancouver Art Book Fair. In August, we’ll be at the Bremerton Zine Fest (8/3) and CAKE (8/24-25). Our appearance at CAKE will be our first time tabling in Chicago!

We also have a Riso Animation workshop coming up at Paper Press Punch this month on August 4th. We opened up 1 more spot if anyone in the Seattle area is interested in joining in-person in Georgetown. We’ll bring our freshly printed batch of Riso Animation How-To Guides for attendees - this guide has been our fastest selling book of all time! We printed 250 books in Nov 2023 and another 500 in July 2024.

*We had to cancel our August 18 workshop at Secret Room PDX, but lookout for some visits to Portland in the Fall!*

We’re in the midst of re-printing many of our books and getting ready to release the Zine Hug Color Chart Volume 3! This will feature new colors, including our beloved Mahogany, Mist, and a new mystery color that you might find familiar 😉

Upcoming Events:

8/3 Bremerton Zine Fest (Bremerton)

8/4 Riso Animation Workshop at Paper Press Punch (Seattle)

8/24-25 CAKE (Chicago)

9/1 SF Zine Fest (San Francisco)

9/7 RAZ (Los Angeles)

9/21 Portland Zine Symposium (Portland)

10/24-26 Lightbox Expo (Los Angeles)

Hope to see you soon!

🖤 Alex & Zack

PS. Have you seen the update of RISO Bookstore? There are new books from Cold Cube, S.A.R.A., Robert Baxter, Secret Room Press, Neoglyphic Media, Living Room Press along with favorites from Anemone and Zine Hug 😘