At some point last year, I started making drawings of people holding gigantic goldfish. I can't really say why. I mean, it's not unusual for me to be drawing people and animals interacting in weird ways, but this specific image kept appearing in my sketchbook and notes. I just liked the look of the two together, and I started thinking about and looking up big animals and their mini-mes: giant and fish-bowl-sized goldfish, tigers and kittens, giant isopods and roly-polys. So when a relief project rolled around, I decided to pick a goldfish-laden character from my sketchbook, and decided she seemed just the type to be having a tea party by a pond with a pelican-type bird.

So really it just is a quiet little illustration that arose organically from sketchbook musings.

It turned out to be a pretty grueling, time consuming linoleum block to cut. I traveled everywhere with my little block, and I lived in a world of neck and back pain. I regretted not composing a drawing more suited to cut a relief from. However, when I printed the block, I was quite proud of my line quality; I felt like I had stumbled upon a good technique, and decided to repeat the process and do some more reliefs with really organic contours. At the same time, I was trying to break free from my habit of making over-complicated silkscreens, and to appreciate the loveliness of overlapping transparent layers that come about so easily in silkscreen. I said to myself, "I'll silkscreen color under the relief, but it'll be simple; 4 or 5 colors at most. And no coloring in the lines!" So I played with shapes that loosely followed the composition of my linocut by cutting shapes from construction paper with which I would expose my screens.