HEX exists in four versions. Two are hand-pulled onto paper, HEX Green and HEX Blue, both £150. Two are hand-pulled onto real oxidised copper, HEX2 and HEX3, both £450. Same artwork, same five layers of CMYK dither screenprint, same hands pulling the squeegee across the mesh each time. The gap in price isn't a mark-up. It comes from what the ink is sitting on, and from the six months it took to work out how to get ink to sit on copper at all.
The image itself started away from the print bench entirely. I built small sculptures out of cellophane and plastic, spray painted them, then photographed them so the light caught the surfaces and gave the illusion of depth. That photography went into Photoshop and Illustrator, where I mixed it with illustration and separated the whole composite into layers a screen could actually print, which turned out to be the hardest part of the process.
The copper came after that, and it was its own education. I had to learn how to oxidise copper sheet, how to coax it into that blue-green patina, and find a supplier who could actually get me the right stock. Once oxidised, the copper needed sealing so it stopped changing the moment it looked right, rather than continuing to shift under the ink. Only then could I start learning to screenprint onto metal at all, which meant specialised inks, working out the dither process from scratch, and exposing the positives properly on a 120 mesh screen. None of that came free. Copper ruined by a bad oxidation attempt, or a screen exposed wrong, is copper and time that's simply gone.
Not every piece takes that long. Jacky went a completely different way: an old stack of imagery from 2019, transferred onto paper with acetone before four layers of screenprint were pulled over the top. Acetone is unpredictable, which is exactly why I used it there. It creates textures you can't fully control or repeat, and the screenprint on top gives that chaos some structure. It's a one-off, not an edition, made in a fraction of the time HEX took, and there's only one left.
What you're actually paying for
Not the ink. Ink is cheap, whichever surface it's going on. The price reflects the time it took to work out how to make a piece at all, materials that don't forgive mistakes, and the fact that nobody hands you a shortcut through either one.
Time is the real cost here, more than materials. Paper and copper have both gone up in price over the past few years, but the bigger expense by far is the months spent failing before a print earns the right to be sold at all.
There's a version of this where some of these pieces would be priceless. Six months is a long time to spend chasing one idea, and there's a handful I still don't entirely want to let go of. But pricing an independent practice, especially one without much gallery backing, means pricing for people who can actually afford to buy, not for what a piece is worth to me personally. HEX sits between £150 and £450 depending on what you're buying into, not at whatever number would make it easier for me to keep.
A few things people ask
The copper costs three times the paper version because it's real oxidised metal, not paper made to look like it. Sourcing it, sealing it, and printing onto it with specialised ink adds genuine cost on top of the same five-layer design.
How long did HEX actually take? Depends what's being counted. Pulling a single print, once the process exists, takes a few hours. Working out how to get there took about six months, most of it spent oxidising copper sheets that didn't survive and re-separating the artwork into layers that would actually print cleanly.
Are the copper editions genuinely limited? Yes. A small, hand-numbered run split across two designs, HEX2 and HEX3.