I started sending actual risograph prints to people who bought screenprints online and something happened I didn't expect
I've been selling small edition screenprints through Instagram and my site for about a year now. Nothing huge, maybe 15-20 pieces a month. A few weeks ago I started slipping in a free risograph print with each order, just something I'd already made, an extra, no mention of it in the listing.
I thought it would be a nice gesture. What I didn't expect is that people started posting the risograph more than the thing they paid for. Like, photographing it on their wall, tagging me, asking if it's for sale separately. The free thing became the thing they wanted.
It's making me rethink how I present the work. People love feeling like they discovered something, even if you deliberately put it there. There's something about the "bonus" object that reads as more authentic than the main one, probably because it feels less like a transaction.
I don't know, maybe this is just a thing everyone in product already knows. But coming from a fine art background where you never give anything away because it devalues the work, it's messing with my head a little.
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This doesn't surprise me at all, honestly. The stuff you make when nobody's paying for it yet, when you're just playing, that's where the thing lives. The commissioned work is you performing, the freebie is you thinking out loud.
I see it in mosaic all the time. Someone will commission a piece, big formal thing, months of work, and I'll throw in a small experimental one I did on the side. Nine times out of ten that's the one they light up over. Because it wasn't trying to please anyone, and you can feel that.
This is such a good way to put it. I do acrylics and it's the same, the little sketch studies I do on cheap paper, no stakes, no one's ever going to see them, those are the ones people ask about if I happen to post one. Meanwhile I'll labor over a canvas for weeks and it gets a polite like 😅
I think there's something about not having time to ruin it. When you're just messing around you dont second-guess every mark.
The sketchbook thing, exactly. There's no stakes in it so you're not performing, you're just looking. I think people sense when a hand is free and when it's tightening up to get it right.
It's making me want to build a whole practice around the thing that happens when nobody's watching, and see if I can hold onto that feeling even when I know people will see it. Not sure that's possible but worth trying.
Yeah, that's exactly it. The thing that wasn't trying to be anything ends up being the thing. I keep thinking about what it means that people can tell the difference, that the effortlessness reads, that they sense when something came from a different place in you.
Do you keep the experimental ones for yourself or do you sell them eventually? I'm wondering if I should just start offering the risographs as their own thing now, or if that would kill whatever it is that makes them work.