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was pullin' a fresh edition of the hare print this morning, you know the one, the big fella lookin' like he's about to headbutt the moon? Anyhow, I was all set up, the paper's damp, the block's inked up beautiful, black as a tinker's curse. And I pull the bar through, nice and steady, expecting that crisp impression. But instead? The ink's just... gone. Not all of it, mind, but patches, like a badger's dug it up and run off with it. I'm standin' there lookin' at this half-hearted ghost of a print, and the head on the coffee I'd just made went cold thinkin' about it. Spent a good twenty minutes with a rag and some solvent tryin' to figure out where I'd gone wrong. Turned out a tiny bit of dried ink had flaked off the roller and was just shuttin' the ink out. Ah sure, the joys of the trade, eh? Had to re-ink and do the whole lot again. At least the second go was perfect. This one's got a sort of gritty charm to it though, I think. Might keep it for myself.

There’s a particular sound when the ink roller hits the litho stone just right, that sort of soft, sticky drag. It’s not like anything else, not the scrape of a blade on lino or the hiss of a spray can. It’s a sound that means you’re getting somewhere, that the image is starting to lift off the stone and onto the paper. Spent all morning with that sound, trying to get a really deep black on this new piece. It’s not a hare this time, something a bit different, but the same old graft really. You get lost in it, you know? The world outside just fades away and it’s only you and the stone and the smell of the ink. Grand way to spend a Tuesday, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

I need to say this somewhere. Two years back, a friend's sister asked me to do a sketch of their old house in Basavanagudi, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden pillars, before the builder came in. I said 6,000. Family-adjacent rate, I told myself. She was thrilled, paid half upfront without a word. It took nine days. Ink on cold press, 12x16, and I redrew the facade three times because the perspective on those pillars kept going soft on me. Fine. That's my problem, not hers. But then came the framing. I wanted it to look good for them, so I got it mounted and framed properly. 2,800. And the drive to and fro, two trips with samples, another 600 in autos. So 6,000 minus 2,800 minus 600. Plus paint, paper, my own time. I did the arithmetic that night and just sat there. The thing is, I have not raised my rate since. Same 6,000 for a similar size, and I know two other people who were quoted it too. It has become THE number. I'm scared to touch it because they all know each other. The house is gone now, by the way. Demolished last March. So the drawing is the only record of it, which makes it worse somehow, like I should have charged more for that. If you've broken out of a friends-and-family number without it turning into a whole thing, tell me how. I genuinely want to know. 🙏

Something I noticed while sorting old sketchbooks this week: the pages from my architecture days, drawn in a hurry between site visits, are looser and better than anything I've done since I started taking painting seriously. Same hand, same pen. The only difference is that back then nobody was going to look at it. Now I sit down to a fresh page and the line gets careful, and careful is death for ink. I did a corner house in Basavanagudi on Sunday, one of those with the madras-tile roof and the green shutters, and I caught myself going back over a balcony railing to fix it up. Ruined the whole rhythm of it. The railing is now the only neat thing on a page of scribble. I've started doing a throwaway warm-up page before the "real" one, just to get the cautiousness out of my system. Half the time the warm-up is the one worth keeping. Curious whether this happened to anyone else when they went from hobby to calling it their work. Does the seriousness creep into your hand?

Carved a heron block back in March, pulled a proof, and the head on it was grand but the legs were all wrong. Stiff, y'know, like the poor creature was standing on broom handles. So I cut the whole lower half out and re-carved it. Just spent today proofing that version and sure the legs are lovely now but I've gone and ballsed up the wing that was perfectly grand the first time. There's no version of this where you don't find out. You're always a day and a half of carving away from knowing you shouldn't have touched it, and a day and a half past that from being glad you did. The lino doesn't forgive and it doesn't remember, it just sits there with whatever you last did to it. I've three hares in the pile like this, each one the second or third attempt at the same fecking bird or beast. One of these days I'll frame all the discarded proofs together and call it a series. Call it "Learning to Leave It Alone" or perhaps more honestly "Learning to Not." Anyway. The wing. I'll either live with it or I won't. The lino's not going anywhere.

came into the studio this morning, absolutely Baltic out, and soon as I opened the door that cold linseed oil hit me. the sharp of it. the black of it. there's something about that smell that just says "right, you're home now" and the rest of the world can go hang. my wife says I smell like a garage and a church had a baby. she's not wrong. I've been printing all morning and my hands are a state, got black under every nail and probably on my face too. there's a print proof drying on the rack and I don't know yet if it's any good but the smell alone made it worth showing up. sure that counts for something.

So the auld roller finally gave up last week, splitting right along the edge, and I went and got a proper one. Hard rubber, sixty euro, the man in the shop said it'd change my life and I laughed at him. It has, in the wrong direction. The old one had a soft spot in the middle, so every time I rolled out ink I was getting a slightly uneven film, and I'd been compensating for years without knowing it. Chasing thin patches with the baren, adding a second pass on the left side of the block, all this fussing. Now the ink goes down dead even and my proofs are coming off clean as anything and I don't trust a single one of them. All that fizzing I did on the hare's ear last month? Not the carving at all. It was the roller. Two days of feeling like a genius followed by the realisation that I've spent about four years carving around a goosed tool. The hare looks the same, like. The hare always looks the same, that's the whole problem. Anyway if you see me at the market in Spiddal on Saturday and there's a hare with a slightly less fussy ear than usual, that's why. What's the bit of kit you've been silently working around, because I'd bet good money every one of us has one

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works. But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it. So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work. I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper. Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself. What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?

There's a Saturday market in Galway I've been doing on and off for maybe twelve years. Rain, hail, the odd glorious day where everyone's in great form. And I used to think the point of it was to shift prints, which it is, but the real thing it taught me is how to talk to people about what you make without sounding like you're selling. You get all sorts at a stall. The tourist who wants something that says Ireland without being a leprechaun on a toilet. The local who stops because they recognise the pier or the mountain. The person who clearly loves the work but hasn't got thirty quid and stands there turning a card over in their hands. And you learn, quick, that the ones who buy aren't the ones you try to convince. They're the ones you just talk to, normally, about the carving or the ink or the hare that lives in the field behind your house and won't let you get near it. The thing that stuck with me is this: I've never sold a print by telling someone how good it is. I've sold plenty by telling them the story of the night I carved it and nearly took the tip of my finger off, or how the block got dropped in a puddle and the crack became part of the print. People want the thing behind the thing. They don't want a pitch. Anyway. The market's grand for that. But online, I still catch myself trying to sound like a proper business instead of just a fella in a jumper with ink under his nails. And the minute I do that, engagement drops off a cliff. The posts that work are always the ones where I forget I'm supposed to be marketing and just talk about what happened today. Sure I don't know where I'm going with this except that the best marketing advice I ever got was from a woman buying a print of a heron who said "just tell me why you made it" and walked away with two.

There's a proper black magic to the first pull of an edition. You've sharpened the gouges, you've proofed it till you're sick of the sight of it, and then you ink the bastard and you hold your breath because forty sheets is a long way and the lino's only going to get softer and mushier and more treacherous the whole way down. Anyway. Forty prints off the whale mooring block today, every last one clean. Not a dry spot, not a slip, not a bit of the fine line work packing up. The last one came off as good as the first and I near laughed out loud in the empty studio. The dog looked at me like I'd lost the run of myself entirely. There's a lot of the job you can't control, sure. Paper that decides to cockle on you, ink that goes off, a Tuesday. But that one hour, that run of forty, that was mine. Nobody else's. Felt like the whole craft thing was worth a damn today.

I finally did the real math on my last edition and it's worse than I thought. Thirty prints, edition of 30, sold at €220 each. Sounds fine until you count what's actually in it. The plate took me six weeks of drawing and biting. That time doesn't multiply across the edition, it just sits there as a lump. Then each sheet: paper, ink, the hours in the studio, the failed proofs that go in the bin before a single good one exists. Two plates cracked before I got one to bite right. So €6,600 gross on the edition. Take out paper and ink and studio rent and the proofs that failed and the plate time at anything near minimum wage and I'm looking at maybe €9 an hour if I'm being generous with myself. And that's the number I'm supposed to feel lucky about because editioned work is "approachable" for collectors. What I can't figure out is where the line is. Raise the price and a print is no longer the entry point, it's a real purchase, and people hesitate. Keep it where it is and I'm basically paying to have my work out in the world. I know plenty of printmakers who've just stopped doing editions altogether because the answer never made sense. I'm not there yet but I'm watching the math get worse every time I add up a new one.

So the small cheap brayer I'd been using for years finally gave up, the roller went egg-shaped on me around last Tuesday, and I went in to the art shop in town half intending to buy another cheap one and came out with a proper hard rubber one for a tenner. I know. Wild spending. But here's the thing, I've been printing the same block of a heron for about three weeks now trying to get an edition of twelve out of it, and I was blaming the lino, blaming the ink, blaming the damp weather in the shed, and it turns out the whole time it was the brayer. The cheap one was pressing uneven, so the middle of the block was picking up ink lovely and the edges were starving. Twelve prints in and the last six look like a different block entirely. So many years at this and I still spend a fortnight giving out about the wrong yoke. The block was grand. I was the problem. Trimmed the first six in half for test prints, which killed me slightly, but they're in the bin now and I've moved on with my life. Anyway, the heron's nearly there. Much darker at the edges now, properly moody, which is what I wanted all along.

Did a linocut for a mate's mother two years back. She wanted a heron for the sitting room, lovely woman, made us dinner while the ink dried. Charged her €80 because sure, she's family-adjacent, and it was only one colour, how long could it take. Twelve hours it took. Twelve. And between the lino, the paper, the good ink, the proofing runs where the bugger wouldn't sit flat... I made about €4.50 an hour and told myself it was the gesture that mattered. Now every second cousin and neighbour's dog is looking for the "€80 heron." Two women this month alone, and one of them was genuinely offended when I said €180 for a bigger one. "But you did Joan's for eighty." Joan knows the price of bread, so she does, and she's mortified, but the cat's out of the bag. Worst part is I can't even be mad at them. I set the damn rate. If you undervalue your own work once, that's the price that follows you around for the next five years. I've had to have the awkward chat three times now and I still hate it every go. Lesson's learned anyway. Friend rate is a bottle of whiskey and a proper thank you, not a discount that pads itself into every conversation after. Sure I'm still not sure how to undo it, but I'm not doing another one at eighty. That ship has sailed.

I pulled twelve proofs of the same plate today. Same plate, same ink, same paper, same rag on the press. You'd think after ten years I'd stop flinching when the paper lifts. I don't. There's always one corner that didn't bite, or the ink decided to sit heavier on the left, and suddenly it's not the plate anymore, it's that exact moment of pressure and humidity and my own tiredness. Every single copy slightly off from the one before. That's the thing nobody tells you about printmaking when you come in thinking it's about multiples, about the copy. It's the opposite. The edition is a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep. What actually happens is you make thirty versions of the same drawing and each one teaches you what you meant, a little later each time. I have one from this batch where the registration slipped maybe a millimetre on the yellow pass. It's wrong. I keep looking at it. It might be the best one of the day.

I've got this one block of a hare I first cut maybe six years back. Must have printed it fifty, sixty times. Different papers, different inks, couple times I've gone back and recarved bits that were wearing down. It's not even my best design, honestly. But there's something about the way the years settle into a block, the little cracks, the soft spots where the lino's starting to go, the way it catches ink different than it did fresh. I can tell you which edition was the summer my daughter was born, which one was the year I was in a bad way and every print came out muddied because I wasn't paying attention to pressure. I know lino's cheap enough, I could cut a fresh one any time. But I don't want to. That block's got my life in it now. The dog's chewed one corner, there's a coffee ring on the back, the registration marks are all scratched up from me rushing. It's like an old pair of boots. You don't replace them, you just keep wearing them till they fall apart. Anyone else holding onto a tool or a block way past its prime for no good reason?

Not a metaphor, it's actual lino dust and ink and the same two feet in the same spot for eleven years. The floor is that cheap grey vinyl stuff and there's two pale patches about the size of my boots worn clean through the pattern, and a crack running off the right heel. I noticed it properly last week because the small fella was in under the table looking for a toy and he came out with a lump of dried ink shaped like a kidney and asked me was it a fossil. Anyway the actual thing on my mind: I'm laying a new floor in there in the spring and I genuinely don't know whether to keep the patches. Part of me wants to cut the two of them out and nail them to the wall over the bench, like a pair of old boots. The other part of me thinks that's the sort of thing a fella does right before he starts charging people to look at his studio. The crack I'm not worried about, the crack can go. What's the daftest thing ye have kept out of a workspace because throwing it out felt like a lie about how long you've been at it.

Look, I know what the problem is and I'm going to say it out loud so I stop being thick about it. I'm on a heron, standing in the shallows, and the whole thing hangs on the neck. That S-curve is the print. Everything else is furniture. And I've cut the neck about 2mm too thick at the shoulder join, so instead of that coiled tension it looks like a goose that's had a feed of pints. I've proofed it four times now on the same sheet of Japanese paper, telling myself each time it's just the inking, the pressure, the paper's a bit damp, I'll pull it again when I'm fresh. It's not the inking. The block is wrong. The annoying bit is the fix means cutting a new keyblock from scratch. There's no adding wood back. I could scrape a sliver off the shoulder line and see if I can slim it down, but then the wing feathering above it has nothing to sit into and it'll look like a heron wearing a scarf. So it's start again, and I've two weeks to the market in Spiddal. Any of ye ever try cutting the thing you're avoiding on a scrap block first, just to prove to yourself it's the right cut? I've a mind to do it but I suspect I'm only delaying the inevitable and I know it.

I'm printing a four-plate etching this week, hard ground line over aquatint, Charbonnel black, on this Somerset that's been in the drawer since a residency in 2021 and has gone slightly cockled at the edges. I pulled twelve proofs Sunday. On the first nine the ink flaked off the shoulder of the plate where the ground got scratched too thin, a little starburst of grey dust sitting on top of the image like ash. By proof ten the plate had worn in and it stopped. Clean. So I have nine with the flake and three without, and I've spent two days now trying to decide which one the edition is. The obvious answer is the clean one, that's what the plate does when it's properly bitten and properly inked. But the flake is the only mark in the whole thing that isn't mine. It's the part that happened. There's a thing I keep coming back to, that a print is supposed to be the same every time, that's the promise. And here is a small accident that makes nine of them not the same, and my first instinct was to call the nine the real ones and the three the mistakes, which is backwards and also feels true. I know somebody is going to tell me to just re-bite the plate and print it properly. I probably will. But I wanted to say it out loud first, because the moment I fix it, the version I care about stops existing, and I'm not sure I've decided that's fine. Anyway. If anyone has a rule for this, like a cutoff for how much unplanned mark you're willing to certify as the print, I want to hear it. Mine keeps moving.

The block's been sat on the shelf by the radiator since Sunday and it's gone slightly banana on me. Not a lot, you'd feel it more than see it, but when you're rolling the ink across it you get this patch down the middle that grabs more than the rest. I could re-mount it. I know I could. I've a sheet of 6mm ply in the shed doing nothing. But I've been pulling proofs off it all week and honestly the patch is doing something I like. It's the heron's back, where the water breaks behind him, and the ink sits heavier there so you get this darker mass right where I'd have spent an hour stippling trying to fake it. So I'm leaving it. I've written "warp" on the back of the block in pencil so future me knows it wasn't a mistake, and I'm carrying on. The thing nobody tells you starting out is how much of this job is just deciding which accidents to keep. I spent my first few years chasing flat blocks and clean edges and dead-level pressure and I got prints that were technically right and had nothing in them. Now I'm ringing the studio with an aul Calor heater and hoping the lino takes a notion. Anyway. Banging out the last of the run tomorrow morning before the small lad's match, so if it's all gone sideways by then I'll know the heater won the argument.

Finished an edition of twelve etchings this week and every single one is a clean pull. Registration on point, ink consistent, not one bitten edge. I should be pleased. Instead I'm staring at the stack feeling like I made a photocopy of a painting I never actually made. I know printmakers are supposed to chase the perfect run. But the ones I actually care about in my own collection are the failed proofs, the ones where the plate was over-inked or the paper shifted a hair. You can see the hand in those. The edition of twelve is just a document. I'm wondering now if the whole edition is the wrong unit for me. Maybe I want to keep the plates alive, keep pulling until something breaks, and let the differences be the point. Repetition as the subject, not the obstacle. That's the theory anyway. The practice is that I have twelve identical prints and they're boring me. Anyone else hit this wall where doing it right kills it?