Some projects feel like work. Some feel like walking straight into the heart of why you do what you do. This calendar for Kaleidoscope Collective was the latter of the two that reminds you how printing can be when community and craft overlap.
Kaleidoscope Collective is a wonderful store in downtown Rogers, a place that shows local art, hosts classes, and helps support local creatives. The calendars were designed by West Hand Co and each month features artwork by a different local artist. Collage, illustration, and even paintings laid out side by side in one long lovely stack. My job was to bring it all to life with the risograph which is never a small task and definitely not with three colors on every page.
Each 11 by 17 page had scarlet, blue, and yellow ink. That meant every sheet had to go through the risograph twelve times because each page is folded and printed on both sides of heavyweight yellow stock (one of Kaleidoscope Collective’s signature colors). The whole thing took around one hundred twenty hours and stretched across three weeks simply because ink needs time to dry and I do my best not to hurry color when it is trying to settle.
The process started the way many print jobs do with a stack of beautiful inconveniently large paper. The sheets arrived as 12.5 by 19 so everything had to be trimmed by hand down to 11 by 17. From there every sheet was folded by hand to make sure the crease was perfect. My Risograph machine is picky and slightly crooked folds can throw the whole thing out of alignment.
Next I made a mock calendar that I kept nearby the whole time just to stay sane. Then came the scanning. Each page holds three colors on four quadrants. That is twelve scans per page for a total of eighty four scans. A small mountain of grayscale sheets that would eventually guide my ink layers.
I started printing with yellow because it is the lightest. After a few days of drying I ran all the scarlet layers then the blue. Then every page had to be folded the opposite way and printed again on the back; yellow then scarlet then blue. More drying and more checking more patience. It is so easy to want to run one color after another but that can cause an inky mess in a hurry.
Once everything was finally printed I inspected every page and cleaned up as many ink specks and smudges as I could. Then the real assembly began. Folding, collating, stacking, and checking. When each calendar was finally built it went to the stapling machine and then to the guillotine cutter to square the bottom edge. The last step was one more full flip through of every single calendar before delivering the finished stack to Ashlyn at Kaleidoscope Collective.
Projects like this are why I love risograph printing. It is slow. It is physical. It asks you to touch every single part of the process. And in this case every hour went toward celebrating the artists who made the work inside. These calendars are full of local hands and local color and I was grateful to add mine to the mix.
If you spot one hanging somewhere in Rogers I hope you can see the labor and joy in each page. It truly took a village and a very stubborn risograph machine to print a year of art.