Making it Home – Magpies Linoprint

 ‘Making it Home’ is inspired by magpies building their nest in the silver birch tree in my front garden, I got great satisfaction knowing birds chose a tree I had planted myself.  I liked playing around with the negative, or white space of the tree branches to frame the sunset sky and encapsulate this little habitat. I was fascinated at how the magpies cleverly built their nest while the tree was still in bud making it easy to take in little branches as they built it. It looked so clumsy and exposed but within a week or two the tree was covered in leaves giving them shelter even though the nest always seemed so small as the tails would hand over the edge.

This piece is hand printed with 2 lino blocks, one for black and a reduction cut block for the background oranges.  Printed on Fabriano paper with Cranfield Oil inks.  

In the reduction block for the sky, as each layer is printed, further lino is carved away to print subsequent layers.  

The print size is A3 and there is an edition of 18 prints