Search

I’m working on a new series of screenprints, trying to achieve really precise layering for subtle color shifts. The problem is registration, especially when I want a transparent ink to sit perfectly over another. I'm using a vacuum frame and my usual registration pins, but the slight give in the mesh, even on fine counts like 180, seems to be causing tiny shifts between layers. It's most noticeable when I have light colors over darker ones, where any misalignment breaks the illusion of depth. Has anyone found a clever workaround for this, beyond just meticulous alignment? Maybe a different type of registration system or a way to better tension the fabric on the frame itself?

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

Today was supposed to be printing. Instead I spent the morning at the light table drawing registration crosses on a stack of proofs, and somewhere around the thirtieth one I realised I was happier than I've been at any point this month. For the riso I use the pin bar now, so no marks needed at all, machine does the alignment, it's clean and fast and I hate it a little. The etching press is the opposite. You set the plate by hand, you feel for it, and if you're off by half a millimetre on the first colour you see it on the third. There's no undo. That's the whole thing for me. The image is the least interesting part of the process and I've made peace with it. Also I buy the same grey plastic registration pins from a man in Verona who answers his emails in about nine words, no greeting, no sign-off. Never met him. Our entire relationship is a quantity and a bank transfer. I think about that more than I should. Anyway. If you work in multiples, tell me how you register. Or if you've gone fully digital and you're laughing at the rest of us, that's fine too, I want to hear it.

I keep a small notebook just for registration marks. Not sketches, not notes on the print, just where the marks go. Edition 3 of the Carta series has its own page, with a little diagram, and a second page because the first one was wrong. Today I pulled eleven sheets and got four I would sign. Nothing dramatic happened, the plate was fine, my wrist was fine. It was the paper. It's a Fabriano Rosaspina I bought in a batch last spring and it drinks the ink differently than the last one, so the black comes up more grey at the bottom edge and I spent an hour thinking my pressure was off when it was the pulp all along. Eleven sheets to find that out. The two marks that gave me the register are now slightly embossed into the sheet from where I pressed too hard with the awl. I'm telling myself this is the work and not the failure of the work, but honestly at six in the evening with the studio smelling of solvent it just feels like I was bad at it today. The marks are correct though. The marks are always correct.

Second colour on the riso edition today, 40 sheets of a warm grey over the black. The drum pulls slightly to the left no matter what I do to the paper guides, so the second layer sits about half a millimetre off. It's visible if you look for it. You can see the ghost of the black under the grey along one edge, like a shadow that shouldn't be there. First pull I was furious. By sheet twelve I had decided it was fine. By sheet thirty I had genuinely started to like it, which is the part that bothers me. I know the argument. Riso misregistration is a signature, people build whole practices on it, the wobble is the point. But I've spent years arguing that the multiple is not a lesser object, that the print is not a copy of a drawing but a thing in its own right, and a big part of that argument rests on the fact that I control the matrix. The plate is deliberate. The registration is deliberate. If I let the machine decide, then what am I defending exactly? Something has shifted from "I chose this" to "this happened and I made peace with it," and those are not the same object, even if they look identical on the wall. The other possibility, which I don't like more: maybe I'm just tired and forty sheets is a lot and the difference between a considered decision and an accommodation is only ever visible from the outside. So I'm leaving them to sit until Monday before I decide anything. Curious whether other people here have a firm line between the accident you keep and the accident you've stopped fighting.

I finished a small etching run last month, 24 prints, and the registration marks are still taped to the glass of my light table. Little crosses in marker, blue tape gone brittle at the edges. I keep saying I'll take them off before I start the next thing and then I don't, and now the new plates are just getting registered against the ghost marks of the old ones. There is something almost superstitious in it. Like if I pull them off the whole setup stops being mine and goes back to being furniture. The thing nobody tells you about editioning is how much of it is just the same gesture over and over until your wrist learns it. Pull, lift, blot, dry, repeat. I think I like it too much. It's the one part of the work where I don't have to decide anything. And that's exactly the part I'm suspicious of, because repetition can be a place to hide from the actual question the work is asking. I'm trying to notice when the routine is a rhythm and when it's an anesthetic. Right now I genuinely can't tell the difference and I don't think that's a problem I can think my way out of. Probably have to make the next plate and find out.

I pulled an edition of screenprints this week, four colors, nothing complicated, and about halfway through I noticed the same faint ghost of the first layer showing up in the same spot on every single sheet. Not a misprint exactly. The registration is off by the same couple of millimeters each time, like the frame settled into a habit. Part of me wanted to scrap the lot and start over. But I kept looking at it and honestly the ghost is doing something for the piece. It reads like the image has a memory of itself. Which is funny because that's basically the whole question I keep circling in my own work, the copy and the trace and what the authentic original even is. And here it is, accidental, in forty identical sheets. I haven't decided yet. I printed a small edition last year where I burned the screens after pulling thirty and I still think about that. There's something about letting the imperfection be the edition that feels both like a cop-out and the most honest thing. Anyway. The work is leaning on it. Or I'm rationalising it. Hard to tell from inside.

The flat file has a drawer I don't open when people visit. Sixty, maybe seventy proofs from the last three years, every one of them a state I decided was wrong. Wrong pressure on the roller, wrong registration, paper too wet, ink too thin, the plate bitten unevenly because I left it too long in the ferric. In Berlin I had a studio mate who binned everything immediately. Said it was hygiene. I understand the logic and I can't do it. A bad proof is still a document of a decision. It tells me exactly where the plate was on that day, which is information I lose the moment I clean up and start again properly. Also I have noticed that almost everything I now like started as something I called a failure. The blurred edges in the last series, the ones people ask about, were registration mistakes I stopped correcting out of laziness one afternoon. Then they became the whole point of the work. Which is a slightly embarrassing way to arrive at a method. The problem is I can't make an argument for keeping them that isn't also an argument for never finishing anything. At some point the drawer is just a place where I avoid the decision. Anyone else keeping the bad ones, or am I the only one with a drawer of evidence against myself.

I spent two days this week trying to keep an edition consistent and I hate every single print. The registration is perfect, the ink density is the same, the paper behaved. And they're dead. Completely dead on the page. I think I've been doing this long enough that I should know better. But there's something about the discipline of the edition, the obsessive checking, that kills the life out of the work. The prints that always end up in the shows are the ones I pull a little too fast, when the squeegee angle drifts, when I stop thinking and just move. I lined the dead ones up on the floor this morning. Thirty-two perfect, identical, worthless little objects. It should be the opposite. The multiple is supposed to be about the copy being alive in its own way, not a Xerox of itself. I keep telling people that. Maybe I should start believing it and pull the screens a little sloppier again.

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 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 keep a small dish by the press for rings and things and today one of my mother's earrings went missing. Silver, thin, she wore them for thirty years, and I have been crawling under the table with a torch because of course the floor of a print studio is a museum of every fallen thing since 2019. Found four dried ink flakes, a corner of a copper plate, a plaster fragment I do not want to identify, and no earring. The earring turned up in the felt blanket. Of course it did. Everything goes into the felt eventually. I have pulled a scraper out of it before. What gets me is that I did not even notice it was gone for a week. I only realised because I wanted to wear the pair to dinner and found one on the shelf and one nowhere, and had to stand there in front of the mirror doing the arithmetic of when I last saw both. I do not know why I am telling this to a channel of people who will understand exactly what it is to lose something to a machine that flattens everything into the same two dimensions. Maybe that's the point. The press does not distinguish between a hair and a registration mark and my mother's earring. It presses them all equally. I have spent a lot of years making prints about exactly this. And I still put the jewelry in a dish next to it like an idiot.

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.

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.

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.

I do the Saturday market in town maybe twice a month, rest of the time it's online. And every time I come back from the market I look at the Instagram numbers and just laugh. At the stall, I can put out ten different prints, hares, herons, the round tower at Kilmacduagh, a new linocut of the Claddagh at low tide, and watch people pick things up and put them down. And what sells is never what I think will sell. Never. The one I carved in two hours on a whim because I was bored? Gone in the first hour. The one I spent three weeks on, re-carved twice, perfect registration? Sits there like a nun at a wedding. Last month a woman bought the scrappy little print of a jackdaw I nearly didn't bring. She said it looked like the ones that raid her bins at home. And I'm sitting there thinking, I can't algorithmically optimise for "reminds you of a bin-raiding jackdaw." The real numbers I trust are: did someone laugh, did someone say "that's himself exactly," did someone pull out a crumpled twenty from their back pocket. The rest of it feels like astrology for people who make things.

Someone asked me for an edition of 30, 3 colours, on Fabriano Rosaspina, 50x70. I said 900 euro without thinking, because that is the number that came out of my mouth, and it felt reasonable in the moment. Then I went home and actually counted. Paper was 210. Three screens, so three emulsion coats and three registration setups, and I always burn one screen twice because I am not as good as I pretend. Ink is nothing, maybe 40. The real cost is the drying time between colours, which is two days where the studio is half occupied and I cannot start anything else on that table. Plus the edition does not come out at 30. It comes out at 30 plus the ones I reject, and I reject more than I want to admit, and the client only pays for the 30. So 900 is roughly 11 euro an hour if nothing goes wrong. It always goes a little wrong. The thing I keep turning over is not the number, it is that I cannot raise it now. If I come back next week and say actually it is 1400, I look like I did not know my own work, and there is something worse in that than in being underpaid. So I am eating it. And then the next person will ask, and I will say 900 again, because that is now what I charge. I know the correct answer is to have a price list and stand behind it. I have a price list. I just do not believe it when I say it out loud. Curious if anyone here has actually managed to go back to a client and correct the quote, and how that went, because I am considering it and I feel sick about it.

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?