This is my first experiment with scratchboard.  My sister bought me a clayboard for Christmas, and it looked expensive, so I was too intimidated to start.  I got some smaller ones to ‘practice’ before I did the larger one.

My inspiration is Jennifer Hewitson who illustrates a calendar I’m very fond of. I don’t know how she gets such clean lines.  Maybe she works very small.  I think one of the things I’m most impressed by her artwork is that the images are always enigmatic and powerful; you get the impression that they’re illustrations for a very interesting story.

I’m tempted to just get a pack of small scratchboards and copy her work, image by image, kind of like art students in Europe do in the museums.  Sometimes copying a master is a very good way to learn.  If I do, I won’t post any of them here.

This image is 5″ x 7″, and it fit on the scanner, but something I learned from this is that sometimes scanned images don’t show as well as photographed images when you have to size them down.

I finally got around to printing the pepper linocut tonight.  My first mistake was to put down too much black ink.  It turned out goopy, and the detail didn’t come out well.  Also, I think that it looks better with red, because the solid one was a red pepper, and the lighter one was a yellow pepper, so this looks more like it did in real life.

Pears are next, but I haven’t even started to cut them yet, so it could take a week or more.