These prints were the result of a happy accident.
I was working with inexpensive calligraphy paper. For the price, $2 for 60 sheets, it's a wonderful paper -- strong, with a smooth finish and a generous size (9.5x13-inches).
But it's lightweight and a little thin to handle printmaking ink. In the photo below you can see how the soy oil in the Akua Intaglio inks has spread into the margin. In effect, the print itself becomes transparent. I had fun exploiting what, at first, seemed like a bit of a disaster.
I had started out with a landscape idea and carved this block:
I made a blended roll with yellow ochre and a grey ink named Graphite that I thinned with some Akua Transparent Base. My block was 7.5x6-inches but after working with it for a bit I decided to cut it down to 6x4-inches. At this smaller size it worked for 7x5-inch cards and also for 8x10-inch mats. (I matted both sizes but I preferred the white border I got with the smaller block.)
Then the fun began! Digging through my box of tissue scraps, most of them hand-stained with watered-down fluid acrylic paint, I auditioned different colours to see the effect under the print. Sometimes the scrap was already the perfect shape to suggest hills, like below.
Auditioning moons and/or suns:
I like the mix of the natural world with a graphic element and used a circle punch for the moon. But they could easily be hand-cut for a more organic shape.
With that same idea, I created hills (and a marsh) with straight lines.
I used a glue stick to attach the collage pieces to the underside of the print (a "reverse" of the usual collage technique) and found it hard to get a smooth enough application that the glue didn't show through the sky portion of the print. But that was another happy accident. The glue itself often created a pleasing texture and provided subtle variations of colour, as in the sky below.
I snipped it out. Being thin tissue I didn't have to do an overly careful cut. Layered under the grass print, it looks like this:
