I did this to play around with scatchboard art a little. The format is sort of an homage to Jennifer Hewitson, whose art I admire.  I finally got some decent tools, so removing larger areas of white isn’t such a chore.  The size is only 5×7.

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 went grocery shopping today, and bought a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables.  The pluots are especially beautiful, but their speckled skin won’t work well as a lino cut. 

These sketches are going to eventually become lino cuts (three of them, anyway).