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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?

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?

I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

I'll go first and it's a small one but it's lived in my head for years. Walked into a place in town years ago with a folder of prints under my arm, two hares and a heron, the whole menagerie. Woman behind the desk looked at maybe the top print for four seconds, didn't lift it, and says "we're actually fully booked with printmakers for the next two years." Fully booked. Two years. For printmakers specifically. I was green enough to nearly believe her. Walked back out onto the street and it hit me about fifty yards down that she'd never once looked at the work at all, she'd just wanted me gone and that was the tidiest sentence she had to hand. Only other one that comes close is the "we'd love to keep you on file" from a fella whose "file" I'd say was the bin. So that's mine. What's the first thing a gallery ever said to you that you knew, even in the moment, was pure wind? The "we'll be in touch," the "it's not quite right for our space," the "we only show artists with representation" said by a gallery that shows nobody with representation. Give me the line and where you were standing when you heard it, that's the good bit.

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

Lads, I have a confession. The hare print sold out before Christmas, all forty of them gone, and I'm still in the workshop every night gouging away at the same block like a lunatic. Told myself I was doing a second run. I even bought the paper, a big sheet of Fabriano I sliced down at the kitchen table on Sunday while the young fella ate his Weetabix and judged me silently. But that's a lie. I'm not running an edition. I'm just carving her over and over because I haven't figured out the next thing yet and I can't stand the quiet of a blank block sitting there. You know the way it goes. Every printmaker has the one image that pays the rent and pays the soul and they don't always line up. And when you're between ideas you reach for the thing your hands already know, and you tell yourself it's practice, and it is, sort of, but it's also hiding. My wife asked me the other night how long I was going to keep at the hare and I said grand, not long, and she gave me the look. She knows the look she's getting back. Sitting there with a fresh cup of tea going cold beside me, six hours in, and I'd swear I've made the ears slightly better each time. Which is the problem. They're fine. They were fine the first time. Anyway. I'll stop.

I pulled the last two proofs of an etching yesterday, both from the same plate, same ink, same paper, and there is a visible difference. One is a little flatter in the greys. Not a mistake exactly, just the plate giving up a bit of itself. Normally I would destroy the weaker one and keep the edition clean. But I found myself wanting to keep both, because the whole point of my work is that there is no original, and here I am quietly deciding which copy is the good one. The plate is the original. The print is the copy. Except the plate is now worn in a way the early prints are not. So the plate is also a record of everything I have done to it. I don't have a resolution for this. I just think it is funny that you can spend years arguing that authenticity is a story we tell and then get precious about one sheet of damp paper. Also I am aware this is a very comfortable problem to have, sitting in a studio in Kreuzberg with a hot plate and a stack of Fabriano. But it is genuinely the thing I keep circling. Curious if the painters here feel anything like this about the first version of a painting, or if that is a printmaker's disease.

Spent three weeks pulling a six-colour screenprint edition of 40. Zinc white over a warm grey, the registration had to be perfect or the whole thing read as mud. Got them all numbered, signed, wrapped in glassine. Then the gallery calls, cheerful voice, to tell me they've sliced the margins down to fit their standard 50x70 frames. Every sheet. My margins. Gone. So now the image sits flush to the edge like a cheap poster, and I have to write to 40 people and explain that the edition they bought is technically a different object than the one I made. Half of them won't notice. The half who notice are the ones who'll never buy from me again. The thing that's actually eating me is that I can't decide if I'm furious about the work or about the fact that I said thank you when they told me. I heard myself do it. Thank you, of course, no problem at all. Printmaking is supposed to be the medium where I control the exact specifications. The whole point. Same plate, same paper, same pressure, repeatable, documented, honest. And it still only takes one person with a paper trimmer and a tidy idea of what a frame looks like.

I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with half the printmakers I know. Last month I finished a mezzotint. Rocked the whole plate by hand, which honestly took longer than I want to admit, probably 40 hours across three weeks. Edition of 25. It is the best thing I have made in two years and I would defend that claim in front of anyone. I posted it once. And then I posted a photo of the copper plate itself, still inked, sitting on the scuffed bit of the worktable with my thumbprint in the margin. No caption, no price, nothing. The plate photo got about six times the reach. Someone messaged asking if the plate was for sale. Nobody asked about the print. I've been sitting with this for a week and I don't have a clean point about it. My instinct is to say the algorithm rewards process over product, we all know this, be more human, show the mess. Fine. But I think that's too easy. What that photo showed was the object after labour, the residue, the evidence. What the mezzotint showed was a finished thing that looks like it came from nowhere. And people cannot desire what has no visible cost. That's not an algorithm problem, that is just how wanting works. Maybe I should have been showing the cost all along and I was too proud about the mystique. The uncomfortable part: the prints are not selling. Three gone, and one was to my mother. So now I have 22 of them in a drawer and a decision about whether I keep making plates that take 40 hours, or whether the thing I actually like doing is the part nobody wants to buy. I don't think I'm going to stop. But I'd like to hear from anyone who found a way to make the slow version legible without turning it into content.

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?

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.

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.

The edition of riso prints I made almost as a joke, sitting at the print table during a residency, outsells everything I've put actual weeks into. Etchings that took me months to pull. Nobody buys them. The 60 cent machine-made copies sell out in two days. I keep telling myself it's because they're cheap, people can afford them, they don't need a frame and a wall. But the real reason is probably that they photograph flat and fast and that's what the feed wants. The etching doesn't read on a phone. The riso does. So the market rewards the thing that reproduces well, and I'm a printmaker, I should find that funny. It is funny. It's also a little humiliating that I'm fifty euros away from just making risos full time and telling myself it's a conceptual choice. I'm not complaining about the money. I'm complaining that I can't tell anymore if I'm following the work or the algorithm disguised as the work.

My first real gallery came out of nothing I did well. I was sharing a studio in Berlin, and a woman who had the space next to mine was curating a small group show about the copy. She needed one more printmaker because someone dropped out two weeks before. She asked me, I said yes, that was it. No portfolio, no email, no strategy. Total accident. I have been trying to reverse-engineer that accident for eight years now and I still don't know how to do it on purpose. So the question: how did your first one actually happen? Not the version you put in the bio, the real one. I want to know if anyone got in by anything resembling a plan, because everyone I know seems to have got in sideways. And a second thing, since I am curious: who did the asking? Did you approach them, or did someone hand you the door already open? I think the second happens more than we admit and we pretend it was all our hustle. I will say mine: nobody handed me anything, a curator needed a warm body with a press. Tell me yours is better.

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.

Small printmaker, so this is not some big studio story. I sell at two markets a month and take the odd commission, prints from €35 up to about €280 for the big framed ones. In January I put everything up by a third. Not because I'd found religion about my worth, mostly because framing costs went through the roof and I was sick of eating it. Didn't announce it, didn't write a post about it, just changed the numbers on the board. The thing nobody warns you about: the actual sales barely moved. Maybe a few less of the cheap ones. But the messages changed completely. The crowd that wants a €40 framed original signed to their mother in law on a Tuesday for a wedding on Friday? Thinned out. The people who do get in touch now ask real questions, sizes, editions, can they collect it Saturday. One lad last month paid a deposit before he'd even seen the block proof. I spent years thinking I had a pricing problem when what I had was a sorting problem. The low price wasn't making me sales, it was making me correspondence. The bit I got wrong though: I still price the small unframed ones too low and I know it. There's a stack of hares on the shelf downstairs telling me so. Curious if anyone else found the same after a rise, or if it was the opposite and the whole thing fell off a cliff.

The zine is 24 pages, two colours, riso, edition of 150. I said 45 euro to the curator because it felt like a nice round number and I wanted the show to happen. Then I did the maths on the actual printing: masters, the paper, the fact that I reprinted nine pages because the registration drifted, the hours folding and stapling. Somewhere between 7 and 8 euro an hour. Here is what I keep circling back to. In printmaking the price of the object and the price of the work have almost nothing to do with each other, and I don't know which one I'm supposed to be charging for. 45 euro is roughly what a print costs. It is nowhere near what a print costs. The edition is the whole point, the multiple, the fact that the same image exists 150 times, and the market reads that as "so it should be cheap." I made the thing more available and it made me worth less. There's a logic there and I hate it. I'm not asking what to charge. I know I underpriced it, that's not the interesting part. I'm asking whether anyone has actually solved this for multiples, or whether we all just quietly subsidise the idea.

My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built. My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic. There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it. Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.

I spent yesterday going through the last month's failed prints instead of making new ones. Lined them all up on the long table in the studio, maybe thirty of them. Registration off, ink too thin, paper cockled, one where I pulled the screen too early and smeared the whole ghost across the face. The strange thing is, lined up like that, they look like a series. Coherent, almost intentional. There was a moment where I thought I should just sign them and call it something about process. I didn't. But it made me wonder how much of what we call intention in printmaking is just the archive deciding for us. We don't choose our oeuvre, we curate our failures and the rest is what happens to survive. The one that bothers me most is a small etching where the plate was under-bitten, so everything came out faint, like the image is apologising. I keep coming back to it. Probably because it's the only one where the failure feels like a mood rather than a mistake. Anyway. The table is clean again. I'll make new mistakes tomorrow.