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Someone at the group show in Berlin bought the whole first edition of that screenprint I keep saying I'm done with. All thirty. Not one, the lot. The curator asked if I'd consider printing more and I said no, which felt like turning down a favour but I meant it. The whole point of the piece is that it's finite, that the edition closes and the image becomes something only a few people get to hold. If I reprint it, the thing collapses into exactly what it's about. It's a small sale, really, the money barely covers the month. But the idea held. That's the part I keep turning over. I spent years making multiples and feeling like that made the work lesser, not serious. And now the scarcity is the work. Shouldn't have taken me this long to see my own medium. Anyway. Thirty prints out in the world with my signature and a number. Feels like releasing birds, honestly.

Early on, a gallery told me my work would sell better if I made editions, numbered prints, multiples, something they could move more of. I understood the logic, but cyanotypes are so much about the single moment, the sun that day, that particular seawater, the way the paper dries. I couldn't make myself do it. I said no and walked away, and it took me a while to feel sure about that decision. What's the thing a gallery asked you to change about your work that you wouldn't, or maybe should have, and how did you know?

A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.

I spent six hours yesterday printing the same screen 85 times and somewhere around batch four I started having full conversations with myself out loud. The kind where you catch yourself and think, who am I talking to. Everyone warns you about the technical disasters. Misregistration, bad pull, ink drying on the mesh. Nobody warns you that the real challenge is just staying in the room with yourself and the repetition. It's almost monastic. Or maybe just lonely. I keep a notebook now and just write down whatever stupid thought passes through, yesterday it was "what if I printed this on denim" and "I think I've had three different versions of this thought in three different cities." Anyway. 85 prints, one registration error. I'll take it. But my god the silence gets loud.

A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

The running hare. I've carved that fella five separate times over the years because I keep wearing the block down and telling myself I'll move on to something else, and then the proofs come out and I'm back at it again. Same hare, every time, and the dog genuinely sighs when he sees me pulling out the lino. Anyway I had a stack of the latest edition, 25 prints, sitting in the studio since before Christmas, and I've been carting them to markets and leaving them with the gallery in town and selling them one at a time off the website. And I checked this morning over my tea and there's one left. One. And then a woman from Boston bought that one before lunch. Twenty-five prints, every one hand-pulled by me, and they're gone. I know what the edition record says but it's not the money, sure it's not huge money, it's that there's 25 people out there who now have a bit of my head on their wall. That's a mad thought when you sit with it. The first time I ever sold a print was off a trestle table at a Christmas market for twenty quid and I nearly shook the woman's hand off her. The block's worn to bits now anyway. So it's onto the sixth one, or onto something else entirely. I haven't decided. The dog has an opinion and I'm not sure I want to hear it.

I spent years tweaking my website. Better photos, cleaner navigation, more process shots, less process shots, SEO keywords my friend who works in tech kept telling me to use. And I'd get maybe three inquiries a month, usually from students asking about internships I don't offer. Two months ago my domain expired and I just... didn't renew it. Put together a single PDF with recent work, editions, prices in a table, and my email at the bottom. It's ugly. It's just a document. I send it to people who DM me or write. That's it. And somehow this feels more honest? Like the website was performing professionalism for nobody in particular, and the PDF is just me handing someone what they asked for. I've sold more prints in the last eight weeks than in the previous six months of having a proper site. I don't know if this scales or if it only works because I'm a printmaker with edition sizes I can count on one hand. But I'm starting to think the whole "you need a professional web presence" thing was built for a different kind of practice, or maybe a different decade.

sold a mixed-media piece last week to some guy who saw it in the window of the cafe where i sometimes hang work. he was enthusiastic, which i'm not used to, so i was already suspicious. anyway he messages me yesterday saying he loves it but could i just "tighten up" the torn edges on the bottom right. says they look "accidental." they're supposed to look accidental. that's the whole point. i told him the piece is finished and he can return it if he wants. he got huffy like i was being difficult on purpose. i am being difficult on purpose. but also it's done. you bought a thing that exists. you don't get to edit it after.

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

I don't understand these algorithms ji, my son tries to explain but I think it is a different world. For months I was posting reels, using hashtags, doing everything the年轻人 (young people) tell me. And yes some likes come, some comments, but serious order? Hardly. But there is this one WhatsApp group, just a small group of art lovers from Patna and Darbhanga, maybe forty people. One of my old students added me. I share a photo of whatever I am finishing that week, with a price. No editing, no hashtag, sometimes just in the evening with bad light. And from that group only, I have sold maybe twelve paintings in the last two months. One man came all the way from Muzaffarpur after seeing a photo of a fish motif I posted there. The platforms want us to dance for them. But the real thing is just people who already know what they like seeing. I am thinking maybe the old way is best, find your people, even if it is a small group, and show them your work directly. No algorithm needed.

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.

I realised something yesterday while I was pulling proofs that I already knew but hadn't admitted: the part I love most is the preparation. The drawing on the plate, the aquatint, the biting, the masking. The thinking part. Then I get to the printing and something in me checks out. I rush it. I'm already onto the next idea. I used to think this meant I was lazy or not a "real" printmaker but maybe it's just that my brain likes potential more than completion. The proof is where everything is still possible. Once it's an edition it's just... fixed. Decided. I have about 40 copper plates sitting in a drawer that are etched and ready and I haven't printed. Some from two years ago. I tell myself I'm saving them for the right paper or the right mood but honestly I think I just don't want them to be finished. Anyone else work this way or am I just avoiding the hard part?

My brother's girlfriend works at a small museum in Verona, the kind with a decent contemporary collection and a shop that tries. She asked if I'd do an edition of risograph prints for them, small run, 50 copies. I said yes because family, because I liked the museum, because I told myself it was exposure with a little money attached. I charged €80 per print. My cost per print was about €4 in materials, so I felt fine about it. Generous even. I signed and numbered them, packed them myself, paid for shipping. She sent me a photo yesterday. They're on the shelf at €180. With a little acrylic display stand I didn't know about. And I sat with it. I get it, the museum has overhead, the shop has margins, the frame around the print is worth something. But I did the math on my time and it came out to something like €12 an hour including the design work. The museum is making a 125% markup on my labor and I'm the one who did everything but put it on the shelf. I don't know what the right number would have been. €120? €150? I'm scared to ask for that because I'm not a name yet and I keep thinking, what if they just say no and I lose the connection? But also, what's the connection worth if it's structured like this?

I had a big print deadline, 40 editions for a group show in Milan, and I just stopped posting. No stories, no carousels, no polite little "in the studio" clips. Nothing for almost nine weeks. I was sure my engagement would be dead when I came back. Instead I gained followers. Not a lot, but more than I did in the three months before where I was posting twice a week. And the people who messaged me were actual humans I've met or worked with, not the usual ghost likes. I don't know what to make of this. Maybe the algorithm prefers scarcity. Or maybe when you're not performing, the only people who show up are the ones who actually care about the work. Which is a nicer thought but also harder to monetise, so I'm not sure it's useful. Anyone else had the experience of doing less and getting more?

I have been trying for months to make nice reels about Mithila painting. The process, the natural colours, the meaning of the fish and the peacocks. Good lighting, proper background, all arranged. My son helps me with the editing. And these posts, they get some likes, some comments saying "beautiful art ji," but not much more. Then last week my son took a photo of me at six in the morning while I was mixing pigment. I had not even bathed. Old kurta, hands stained with lampblack. The photo is not good, blurry, bad angle. I told him delete it. He said no, let me post. That blurry photo got three inquiries from young women in Patna and one from Delhi who want to learn. They said it looked "real." One said she could see I was actually doing the work, not performing. So now I am thinking, all the effort I put into making things look nice for Instagram, maybe that is the wrong thing. Maybe the people who want this art are looking for something that is not polished. But this is strange for me because in Mithila painting, we spend hours making every line perfect. The whole point is precision. But online, they want the opposite. I am not sure what to do with this information. Keep posting the blurry morning photos or go back to the proper videos? Both feel wrong in different ways.

I realised this today while staring at a zinc plate I'd already degreased and just couldn't bring myself to touch. With etching you have all these steps before you actually commit, polishing, degreasing, grounding, smoking, and I love that. It's a ritual that delays the moment of actually having to decide something. Painting friends of mine talk about the terror of the white canvas and I kind of don't relate. But I think what I actually can't handle is the single object. The one painting, the one drawing, the one definitive version. Printmaking lets me hide inside the idea of the multiple, if this print fails, there are 49 more chances, and also it's just one of an edition so it doesn't carry the whole weight. I wonder how much of our medium choice is just a sophisticated way of managing anxiety about finality. What's your medium's built-in escape route from commitment?

So there's a new place opened down near the docks, lovely spot, they wanted a big linocut for the main wall, something of Galway Bay, rough sea, the whole bit. I was delighted with myself. Gave them the friends-and-family rate because they're sound and I wanted the work up somewhere people'd see it. €600, I said. Frame included. Generous, I thought. What I didn't do was keep a proper tally of the hours. Carving that thing, it's a big block, 60x40cm, all that water and sky and the little light breaking through, took me the guts of three weeks on and off. Proofing it, pulling the final edition, stretching the paper, framing it myself. Did the maths this morning. Roughly 40 hours all in. That's €15 an hour, and that's before materials, before the frame cost me sixty quid, before the petrol driving it down there. I'm not even angry about it, I'm just looking at the number and thinking, I'd have been better paid stacking shelves. But I'd also have been bored out of my skull, so there you go. Anyway the print looks savage up on the wall. I'll put the price up next time and see do I survive it.

I've been fighting against reels for like two years now. Kept posting finished paintings, good photos, decent lighting, the whole thing. Getting maybe 40 likes and a sale every other month. Last week I was in a rush and just propped my phone up and filmed myself blocking in a sky for about 90 seconds. No editing, no music, just the sound of brush on canvas and me muttering "that's not gonna work" under my breath. Threw it up with a one-line caption. It's at 12k views. I got three commission inquiries. I don't know whether to be thrilled or annoyed that the thing that finally works is me looking like a mess in real time instead of the polished photos I spent actual hours on. But I guess I'm making more videos now.

I've been wrestling with this particular copper plate for weeks, trying to get a specific layered aquatint. Every proof was muddy or flat. I was close to just shelving it entirely. Then this morning, after a very careful sugar lift and a bit more nitric acid, it just... worked. The subtle tonal shifts are there. Feels like a small victory against the material itself. Now to pull the edition.