When I was little, I could always imagine little worlds, towns, houses in all the mundane things around me.  Some rocks by the road could be a troll village.  An old stump could be someone’s home.  Perhaps, when I’m not looking the breakfast table comes alive!  Now that I’m older I try to recapture that way of thinking.  I think something is lost when we stop being able to imagine things in different ways.  And so, my fork has become a sort of elk, a slice of tangerine is the sun and more forks have become trees.


I've been experimenting with different techniques, layering ink, different papers  and in this print I added some watercolour.  I could never do this before with the Speedball inks unless I used oil based ink which was a pain to clean off the plate.  But my Daniel Smith inks are set when dry so I can paint over them.  Yay!

I have a small fascination for old, or "vintage" kitchen utensils.  I think it's because when you see them you are transported back to some earlier sepia coloured time period when everything was more relaxed and people didn't have computers or cell phones and instead made cakes and pies.  J K  Rowling had it right when she wrote about the portkey's.  Touch them and you'd be sucked to another place.  They were a little more drastic than the strawberry fork, but the wizarding world is like that.  Once upon a time, people used special two or three pronged strawberry forks to pierce the strawberry before dipping it in sugar and whipped cream.  I imagine everyone would be dressed elegantly when using these forks, the conversation would be witty and the vocabulary impressive.

However, snapping back to reality here at my computer.  This is a reduction linocut which has five colours of ink on the lovely green Tatami paper and six on the brown stonehenge.  I'm still experimenting with my new Daniel Smith inks and I made the great discovery when I was trying to get an orange which would remind me of a creamsicle that you can mix Daniel Smith with Speedball ink!  This is going to allow me a huge variety of colours and is great info for any printmakers out there.  I only made 8 of these.  They are now available in my Etsy : )