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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'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.

The price of a 5-colour screenprint of mine sat at 120 euro for over three years. Not because I did the maths and it came out at 120. Because 120 was the first number I said out loud to someone at a group show in Kreuzberg and after that it felt like a fact about the work. Meanwhile each impression takes me about forty minutes of actual printing, plus the screens, plus the paper which is Fabriano and not cheap, plus the ones I ruin. If I count properly it was maybe 110 euro of my time per print before anything goes wrong. So I was charging people roughly the cost of the paper and a coffee. In January I changed it to 190. I wrote the new price in the spreadsheet, told the two galleries, and waited for the small humiliating email. Nothing happened. One person bought two instead of one. That is the part that disturbs me more than the money. I think what was actually keeping the price down was not the market. It was me deciding in advance that the work was worth less than what I was asking, and then politely making sure everyone else agreed. Which is its own kind of conceptual problem, and not the interesting one I wanted to be working on. Still haven't raised the etchings. Those are at 260 and I know they should be 340 and I have the email drafted. It's been in the drafts since February.

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?

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'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?

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?

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.

Something I keep turning over: my first gallery never saw my best work. They saw a small edition I'd made almost as a joke, printed badly on purpose, and that's what they wanted. For years I read it as a fluke, or as them not understanding the rest. Now I think they saw the one piece where I wasn't trying to be clever. So I want to know what piece of yours actually opened the door. Not the body of work you're proudest of, the one that did the work. Was it the thing you'd have picked? Or did someone else see something in the piece you almost threw out? I'll go first properly: mine was a two-colour screenprint, 40 copies, one of which is still stuck to my studio wall with tape because I never got around to framing it. Tell me yours. Especially if it wasn't the one you'd have chosen.

Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views. I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well. Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is. I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour. Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?

I have a screenprint edition of 40 sitting here, three colors, on Fabriano Rosaspina, and I put 45 euro on each one. The math is not the problem. Paper, ink, the screens, the hours pulling them, all of that I can count. The problem is the 40. If I print 40 and sell 12, I have 28 in a flat file and I've effectively priced the 12 at 150 each, only nobody paid that and I can't say it out loud. There's a whole historical logic to this, the print as the democratic multiple, the cheap image for the many. I believe in it. I also believe the rent in Kreuzberg does not care about my beliefs. So I keep the price low to honor the idea and then I quietly resent every person who buys one, which is a strange way to run a practice. What I actually want to know is whether any of you price the edition as a whole and not the single sheet. Like, the edition is one object with 40 faces, and the price should carry the unsold ones. I've never seen anybody say this in a way I could use. Maybe because it sounds like an excuse. 45 feels either honest or cowardly and I genuinely cannot tell which. It's been three weeks.

A collector bought one of my prints at the studio open day, then emailed asking if I'd sign it "individually" because "an edition of 50 feels a bit mass produced." I had to explain that the edition IS the work. The number is not a compromise, it is the point. Fifty prints that are one image, one decision, repeated until they stop being copies and become something else. He wrote back, "Oh, so it's like a limited edition." Yes. That is exactly what it is. That was always the whole thing. I spent ten minutes afterward staring at my own screenprint like I had to defend it from its own buyer. Maybe I should start answering the question with "would you say that to a writer about their print run?" I don't know why the edition makes people so uncomfortable. As if the multiple is somehow less honest than a unique object. As if there is a true original hiding somewhere and the rest of us are just photocopying. Anyway. He bought it. I think he still believes he got a discount version of a real artwork. Let him.

I did the math on my last edition of 12. Each print took about six hours of actual work, plus plate prep, plus the failed states I pulled before I got the one I kept. I used to price per piece based on time and materials alone, which meant each print was maybe €180 and I was basically paying myself to make work for people to frame and never think about again. Then I flipped it. I priced the edition as a whole, sold the run of 12 at €380 each, and the margin came out to more than my screenprinting gigs pay per week. Same hours, same copper, same ink. The only difference is I stopped pretending the value lives in the labour and started charging for the fact that there are only twelve of something in the world. Feels almost dishonest. Scarcity doing work that my hands should be doing, or that my hands ARE doing and I just refused to name it. Still not sure where the honest line is between "this took me time" and "only a few of these exist and you can't have one unless you pay." But I'm not going back to per-hour pricing either.

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.

Working on a new screenprint series, and I keep getting stuck on the 'ghost' image. You know, the faint residue left on the screen after a print? It's not the 'real' image, but it has this strange, ephemeral quality. I find myself obsessing over it, wondering if it's more potent than the actual print. It feels like a memory of the image, or a potential for future images. Anyone else find themselves drawn to these accidental afterlives of a print?

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?

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.

Not because I forgot. Because I know what it looks like and I don't want to see it yet. A bite that runs too long goes under the wax and comes out with that soft grey rot around the lines, and you can't undo it, you can only pretend it was intentional or start again. So the plate sits in the tray, and I keep working on the screenprint edition instead, which is going fine, which is the problem. I keep choosing the thing that is going fine. I do this every time the work turns. I get to the part where the idea has to become a specific decision and I suddenly have a very urgent need to re-stretch a screen or clean the ink off the glass. My studio is spotless right now. That is never a good sign. The annoying part is I know the answer. It's a 40 second job, gloves, tongs, rinse, look. And I know the plate is probably fine, probably better than fine, because the last three I was scared of turned out to be the ones that held. Fear and judgement are not the same instrument and I keep using one for the other. Anyway. Tray is still there. Writing this instead of looking, which is a third thing I am doing instead of looking.

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.