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People hear “riso” and picture a fancy printer. It is closer to a stencil duplicator: a machine built in the 1980s to run off thousands of parish newsletters cheaply, which happens to lay down ink in a way that designers fell in love with forty years later.

Each colour lives on its own drum. The machine burns your artwork into a stencil, wraps it around the drum and presses ink through it onto the paper. Soy-based ink, no heat, no toner. The sheet comes out slightly damp and needs an hour before the second colour can go on.

That is the whole trick, and it is also the whole limitation: one colour per pass, a handful of inks that cannot be mixed, and no way to print a photograph the way an inkjet does. What you get instead is a flat, saturated colour that sits on the paper rather than in it.

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.

We print almost everything on 220 gsm Munken Pure. It is uncoated, slightly warm, and it takes riso ink without drinking it, which keeps the colours where you put them.

We tried coated stock early on. It looks wonderful for about a day and then smudges the moment anybody touches it, because the ink never really soaks in. Recycled stock is the opposite problem: it drinks so much ink that a bright pink comes out dusty.

The one exception is Night Moon, which we print on a grey-blue sheet so the yellow has something to fight. It costs more, it jams more often, and it is worth it.