Soul care

I need more creativity in my life, I've decided. I don't need to be good at any of it, but I like to express myself that way, more than in words I think (which is ironic, given that I'm a linguist). Words are the day job. Visual creativity is good for my soul, so my soul tells me.
This week I spent a day being a guinea pig for a friend's workshop planning, and I got to learn about reduction printing. Essentially you chip bits out of, in our case, foam board, roller ink onto it and print onto a sheet. Then you chip more bits out, roller another colour, and print over the top, and so on. I found it very hard to grasp the idea that what you chip away wouldn't print, and would never print from then on, and the way the image carved was a negative of the image printed. It was all quite confusing. I started to almost get it by the end.
The idea was to just play around with different objects (rolled screws, nails, forks, etc), indenting their shape in the foam, but right off I knew mine would be a picture, and I knew it would have meaning. This was the result.

I like it. I'd like to try another one, now I'm getting the hang of it.

And then just to add to the creativity we spent some time weeding and thinning carrots in the church community garden that is on their property and I got some raspberries, rhubarb and a bag of salad greens - beet leaves, lettuce, cilantro, arugula... - to take home and a recipe for rhubarb cake.