After six boyhood years on a Royal Navy training ship, Hughes-Stanton began training as an artist, attending the Byam Shaw School 1919-22, the R.A. Schools 1922-23, and evening classes at the Leon Underwood school at Brook Green, where he was introduced to wood engraving. He was a founder member of the short-lived English Wood Engraving Society in 1925, and joined the Society of Wood Engravers in 1932 after he and his then wife, Gertrude Hermes, had already moved a couple of years previously to the Gregynog Press in Powis. He left Gregynog in 1933, after separating from Hermes, and moved to East Anglia where he founded his own Gemini Press.
In the War he was seriously injured in a POW camp and was repatriated in 1943. In later decades he turned to using lino for colour printing and to create much larger, spectacular images as he went increasingly abstract.