Why our prints never line up perfectly

Low Sun — a two-colour risograph print from Noordkaap Press.

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Every sheet is fed through the machine once for each colour, by hand. Paper is not a rigid thing: it picks up moisture, it stretches a little under the roller, and it is never gripped in exactly the same spot twice.

So the second colour lands a hair away from where the first one did. On a print with a hard edge you see it as a thin halo. On a print with overlapping shapes you see it as a sliver of a third colour along the seam.

We could chase it. Thicker paper, a slower feed, a day between passes. Mostly we do not, because a run of seventy-five where every sheet is a fraction different is the reason to buy one of these rather than a poster from a shop.

If a print comes out badly off we keep it and it ends up on the studio wall, where there is now rather a lot of wall.

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