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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 bought a decent printer last year thinking prints would be my side income. Got the good archival paper, color calibrated everything, spent way too many evenings fighting with it. Sold maybe six prints total, and two of those were to my mother in law. Meanwhile the original paintings sit in my booth at fairs and people keep asking about those instead. The overthinking it took me a full year to figure out: people buy the thing in front of them, they don't buy the reproduction of it. So I stopped pushing prints entirely and just started starting more originals at lower price points. Smaller 8x10s I can finish in two sittings now sell faster than anything I've ever made prints of. Sold nine of those in the last two months at the local craft market alone. Wish somebody had told me that a year and about 300 dollars in ink ago.

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?

Had a market stall at the weekend and the crowd-pleaser wasn't the big linen-backed heron print I was proud of. It was the small rough one of the drowned village, the one I carved off an old photo of my granda's aunt's house that's under the water now in Connemara. Three people bought it and every single one of them stood there while I told them the story. The fella who actually pulled cash out forked over for the smaller, rougher one once he heard the house had a name and a wake in it before the flood. So I've started putting a four-line story under every print on the site instead of "giclee print, acid free, signed." Not the poem, not the essay, just the bones of it. The hare one is now "she sat in the field behind the house the winter I stopped drinking and I thought we were the same animal." Early days but the page views are up and somebody actually messaged asking about the woman in the story. It's not a strategy, it's just me finally telling people why I carved the bloody thing instead of acting like the image should do all the work. Reckon the marketing crowd would call it storytelling. I call it being arsed to talk to people, which is the one thing I'm actually good at. Anyone else ever sold the story and not the picture? Or am I just talking to myself here.

guy at the market today pointed at the largest original i brought, dead serious, "how much for this print?" told him it wasn't a print, it was the actual painting. he nodded, looked at it again, and asked if i could "do him another one just like it." sir. it's one of a kind. that's literally the value proposition. i don't have a ctrl+c for paint. he walked off when i told him the price and i heard him mutter "jesus" under his breath like i'd insulted his mother. ngl that part was kind of worth it. the most exhausting part of this hobby-gig isn't the painting. it's the explaining. every single market i do the same six conversations with the same six men named dave or kevin or brad. i should just print a FAQ and staple it to the table.

Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco. So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve. What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny. And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call. I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.

Okay so I'm eight months into full-time art and I finally have enough data to be genuinely confused. My original watercolors sell consistently, like every time I post a finished piece it's gone within a day or two. But I got a professional scan done of one of my favorites, ordered a small run of prints to test the waters, and they've just been sitting there. Like barely any movement in three weeks. And I don't get it because everyone always asks "do you have prints?" when they see the originals. I made them available. Crickets. My partner says it's because people who buy watercolors want THE thing, the actual one with the paper texture and the wonky edge where my tape was, not a reproduction. And maybe that's true and I should just lean into originals only. But also maybe I priced them wrong or my thumbnails are bad or I'm just not promoting them right. Mostly I'm annoyed I spent real money on the scan and the test run haha. But it's also kind of nice to know the originals aren't a fluke. Any other artists out there where prints flop but originals move?? Or am I the weird one who should've known better.

There's a print I did as a demo at a market two summers back, a little heron standing in a puddle, and I pulled it while a crowd of people stood watching me carve. Hands sweating, chatting away while I was praying I wouldn't slice clean through the lino and ruin it in front of the whole town. I gave the first few pulls away to people who stood there the whole time, the patient ones. Anyway. This week I framed one of the good pulls and it's on the wall in the studio now, and I keep glancing at it and feeling grand about it for the first time. It's not the best print I've ever made, not close. But it's the one where I stopped being terrified of doing it badly in public, and that turned out to be a bigger thing than the print itself. Framed it in a bit of oak scrap I found in the shed, which is very on brand for me. The matting is wonky. I don't care. Anyone else got a piece that matters for the doing of it, not the look of it?

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.

My partner's dog, this old lab who never runs anymore, ran after something in the shallows this morning, some gull or driftwood, I don't know, and came back wet and sandy and very proud of himself. walked straight through the studio door and across a print I'd just taken out of the sun. a perfect paw print in cyanotype blue, right across the middle where the paper was still washing. I was so angry for about ten seconds. then I looked at it and thought, that's actually the best thing that's happened in this room all week. the print was fine, just a nice photogram of seaweed. now it has a ghost dog in it. I'm framing it.

Ach, I'm still buzzing off this. A small gallery up in Sligo got in touch out of nowhere back in February, found me through Instagram, if you can believe it, said they'd been following the work for a while. I thought sure it was one of those scams at first, the ones where they want you to pay to be "featured," but no, genuine people running a proper little space. Sent them a dozen prints this morning, all matted and packed proper. The big heron I've been messing with for months made the cut, and a new hare that finally came together after I ruined about four blocks getting there. Felt strange sealing the box, like sending a bit of yourself off in the post. But good strange. Never had a gallery come to me before. Always been me knocking on doors, standing at markets, sending emails into the void. Nice to be on the other end of it for once. Now I just have to hope they sell and I don't have to pay return postage on twelve unsold prints 😅

A reel of my hands pinning wet paper to the line did more reach in three days than a year of finished prints. I watched the numbers climb and felt nothing but a small cold dread. That's not the work. That's me doing chores in front of the sun. I know the argument. People buy the maker, the process, the story. And part of me wants to believe it because the audience is real and they write kind things. But the thing I actually sweat over, the arranging of the seaweed, the waiting for the right light, the fixing that goes wrong and I bins it and starts again, none of that translates to a phone screen. So what's left is me standing there with a squeegee. Maybe I'm old-fashioned about what counts as showing the work. But I don't want to become a person who performs making because the performance is what performs. The prints keep coming either way. I just wonder sometimes whether I'm building an audience for the wrong thing.

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.

Found a roll of prints I'd hidden away at the back of the shelf, from a week in January two years ago when the river was high and everything I exposed came out muddy and flat. I had written them all off. Today I fished one out, held it to the light, and the watermarks had settled into something I never saw then. Not what I wanted it to be, but what it actually is. A whole different print. I think I was too close to the wanting then to see what was already there. Spent the afternoon flattening the rest under the big atlas. Sometimes the paper just needs to wait longer than you do.

A friend asked me last week what my process is, and I tried to explain the two-week one. The one where I kept failing at getting the seaweed to sit right, burnt three sheets, ruined the fixing bath, got it eventually and it's the piece I'm proudest of all year. And then I told her about the other one, the one that sells consistently: a print I made in eleven minutes during a rain break, tossed a piece of net on a wet sheet, didn't even think about it. That one sells. Over and over. People comment on it constantly. The careful one sits in a drawer. I don't know what that says. Maybe the fast ones carry less effort and more luck and people feel that. Or maybe the thing I fought for two weeks has all my doubt baked in, and you can see it even through the Prussian blue. Some prints just breathe easier than others. I keep telling myself the slow one is the better work, and maybe it is. But the market keeps telling me something else, and I'm old enough now to wonder if ignoring it is stubbornness dressed up as integrity.

Did the accounts for the last market season over a cup of tea this morning, the way you do, and I nearly spat it out. Sold 240 prints over eight Saturdays, which sounds great till you add up the fine: about €4,600 in, and then the stall fee, the petrol, the framing offcuts, the lino and ink and paper and the new gouges I had to buy because the old ones went blunt halfway through July. Net came out around €900 for the season. That's not a business, that's a very slow hobby with a stronger opinion of itself. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. I met a woman at the October market who bought one print of the heron and then came back the next Saturday with her daughter and bought another one the same, "one for each of them" she said. That's not in the accounts. And I sold one to an American lad who sent me a photo of it framed above his fireplace in Chicago, which is mad when you think the lino block it came from has a coffee ring on it from the Tuesday before. I know the whole thing should be priced better and I know the answer is I'm a coward with my own numbers. But I also know I'd still do the eight Saturdays for less than minimum wage, and I'm not sure whether to be proud of that or embarrassed by it. Maybe both. Anyone else ever run the numbers and then decided not to learn anything from them? 🙂

I've been doing this thing the last year or so where instead of trying to flog prints to strangers who've never heard of me, I just trade with other artists and makers. Potter gets a hare linocut, I get a mug. Woodworker gets a heron, I get a stool. That sort of carry-on. And what I didn't expect, half the commissions I've had this year came because that potter showed the print to someone who walked into her studio, or that woodworker hung it in his workshop and a customer asked where it came from. It's the slowest funnel in the world but it keeps working. I'm not even trying to sell at that point, I'm just swapping because I want the thing they make. The other thing is it got me out of my own head about pricing for a bit. Nothing resets your sense of value like holding something someone else spent ten hours making and thinking Jesus that's worth more than twenty quid. Makes you price your own work better too. Anyone else doing this or am I just building a very eclectic house one swap at a time?

The Instagram crowd has gone very quiet the last few weeks. Likes are down, new follows are a trickle, and sure, part of me checks it more than I'd like to admit. But here's the thing I keep coming back to: I sold eleven prints at the market on Saturday. Eleven, cash in a tin, most of them to people who'd never seen my page at all. They just stopped at the stall, picked up the hare, had a chat about it. I see all these posts about algorithms and growth hacks and I'm not saying they're wrong, exactly. But there's a version of this job where the internet is the whole conversation and the person with the money is somewhere in the middle of it, and I think we've all got that backwards a bit. The algorithm doesn't buy prints. It doesn't frame one and hang it in the hallway. Not a big take. Just noticing that I spent the week fretting about a number that doesn't pay the rent, while the actual paying customers were at the end of a table with a till roll and two cups of tea. Anyway. Back to carving. The dog's had enough of me staring at my phone.

Sold a 50x70 cyanotype last week for €180. It was a good week, I should have been glad. Instead I sat at the kitchen table that night counting again: the paper is €14 a sheet now, up from €9 two years ago, the ferric ammonium citrate another €40 for a bottle that makes maybe thirty prints, and I toss two out of five because the light was wrong or the sea water left a tide mark I didn't want. So per finished print, before my own hours, I am at maybe €25 in materials and half my days are duds. €155 for a day of standing at the water, holding paper down, waiting. That is what it comes to when I let myself look. I have not raised a price since 2019 and I am afraid if I do people will just stop. But the arithmetic is getting louder than the shame of asking for more. I think next order I will go to €240 and see who blinks. That number has been in my head for months now, and saying it out loud here feels like the first time it is real.

Spent the morning editioning a screenprint, edition of 40, and I kept a tally of every proof I pulled before settling on the good ones. Fourteen proofs. Fourteen almost-finished prints sitting in a drawer that no one will ever see, and I caught myself thinking about how thrilled I'd be to find a stack of rejected proofs by someone I admire. But mine are just... failures. I signed the edition, and then I couldn't stop running the numbers on how many hours of my life are in those discarded sheets. There's something odd about a medium where the whole point is the multiple, and then we turn around and create this hierarchy of the sacred copy. The artist's proof, the edition, the sketch, the one that got away. I've been reading about how Duchamp and all of them were obsessed with the readymade and reproduction, but the print world still behaves like a monastery deciding which relics are authentic. I don't know. Maybe I should have titled the drawer. Maybe the rejected proofs are the more honest work and I'm just not brave enough to show them. Does anyone else keep their near-misses, or do you destroy them?