I can't
draw.

Which is how I ended up interested in AI long before it was a thing people had opinions about. It got me past the one barrier that would otherwise have kept me out of a craft I love. I was never going to spend three years learning to draw first — I don't have the attention span, and I have the side projects to prove it.

A confession, since we're here: I don't print t-shirts

I've done it exactly once, for a niece, under mild duress. Paper is my thing. Posters, editions, things that hang on a wall and never need washing.

So there's something quietly absurd about most people using this tool for shirts. But I don't live alone on this planet, and the maths doesn't care what's underneath: a dot that survives a 156 mesh screen survives it whether that's cotton or paper below. The seven printers who tested this cover the ground I don't — their work is here. And if you made something too, show us your work.

More jobs than is strictly respectable

Before all this I carried plates, worked doors, ran a gallery, ran a snack bar, organised events. None of it was a plan; all of it was the same reflex — notice something that should exist, make it exist, get restless, move on.

For the last thirty years that reflex has had a business card: I run Motionmill, a web and marketing studio in Antwerp. It also has side doors — Terracraft, a holiday house I run with others, and an ongoing ambition to build furniture properly. The furniture is aware of this ambition. The furniture is waiting.

Two crafts that punish hurrying

Screen printing is the odd one out in that list, and that's exactly why it stuck. It's slow. It punishes impatience with a directness I find almost rude. A screen you burned wrong is a screen you burned wrong, and no amount of hustle, charm or marketing experience will unburn it. For a man constitutionally unable to sit still, standing at a press is the closest thing I have to sitting still.

The other one is fly fishing, and I'm not there for the fish. The fish, frankly, is an interruption. What I'm there for is the search: reading the water, working out where a trout ought to be and why, and then putting the fly exactly there. A technically perfect cast is its own reward. Whether anything rises to it is almost beside the point.

A perfect cast and a print that registers dead on are the same satisfaction. You didn't get lucky. You read the situation, you did the thing correctly, and the thing rewarded you by coming out right.

Two hobbies where hurrying makes it measurably worse, chosen by a man who can't stop hurrying. I'm aware of the joke.

The one part I couldn't leave alone

Making films. Either you buy a RIP for a few hundred euros, or you fight the Photoshop bitmap dialog every single time, or you use a free tool that hands you flat colour layers a press can't print. Every route was friction — and friction is the one thing thirty years of marketing has left me completely unable to walk past.

So I built the thing I wanted. Upload artwork, pick your mesh count, get films you can print and burn today. Spot colours only, because that's what most of us actually print, and pretending otherwise would just cost you screens.

The urge to keep tinkering never really goes away, though. There's a basic CMYK mode in there now too, in beta — I want to find out myself whether it holds up before I call it finished.

Printers use it now. That still surprises me slightly.

Somewhere in all of this there are three kids and a son who arrived without any paperwork ever being involved. Between them they're the reason anything gets finished, and the reason nothing is ever finished on time.

Common questions