365 Day 241

I'm falling in love with this project

YAY! This is the sort of thing I was hoping for -- that I could let go of the idea of "landscape with a capital L" and just make a "places" inside of a deep shadow box...and submit them to the show and not be concerned at all if/when they don't get juried in because I love them so much that I will be hanging them on my walls in my house anyway. And I am only partway there!


Okay. Remember this is how the uncarved linoleum block looked the last time I messed with it. And remember I said it was no big deal because I could still carve on it?







I have been playing with the idea of either a pretty piece of handmade paper (or layers of colors of paper) or a watercolor-washed sheet of watercolor paper as the background for the shadow box scene.


Today I figured out that -- duh -- wouldn't it be good if I tried to carve one?


I traced a circle onto the block.








I started carving it out with different sizes of blades. That was going to be a LOT of carved out area, so I wanted to vary the carving marks.











I have never carved in this way before. I didn't make an outline circle, I just started each gouge at the line and carved away from it, trying to keep the edge even.

My original idea (and I'm not positive I won't still do this) was to carve vertically for the sky and then carve the sun/moon horizontally or diagonally with really thin lines.




While I was carving I thought I would try to leave some surfaces that might look like tree trunks. I did it without lines. I was thinking I might cut really thin lines or patterns into the trees...that is still undecided, too.










Here is the first test print on just plain newsprint. I used my Speedball Red Baron baren instead of a plastic spoon for burnishing because the bottom of the carving is so flat and the top is so open.

Not bad for a first try.










Second test print. There are a lot of ideas floating around in my head about how to proceed with the carving of this block, but I kind of like it like this and I need to look at it for a bit longer.

I was planning on making each of the mostly vertical sections of the hill have individual diagonal lines...maybe make some rock-like gouges every once in a while. We'll see...



In the meantime I got the idea to stamp out a bunch of the images and play with how they could look together.

I needed a lot of trees. These are the bigger ones.


I love repetition!




Yep, yep, yep. I am really loving these individual stamps. I have about a billion ideas of how to use them right about now...and ideas for more images for the set.


These are the smaller trees.


repetition, repetition, rep-e-TITION! sung to the tune of "Levitation" by Hawkwind.





The stamped and cut out landscape elements along with the test print background.









This is cracking me up -- I love it!

This would be dimensional in the deep shadow box. Pretend like you can see behind things.

I just laid these out to see how it might look.

The stripey hills with the sitting rabbit.







The plain hills with the squirrel.










The running rabbit and both hills.

In this scene that large cloud almost looks like the top of a tree over those three trunks. That gave me another idea for more carvings!






Wow -- like I said, I am really falling in love with this whole project! The possibilities are pretty much endless. It's funny. I started out making art by rubber stamping back in the late eighties. I even had my own mail order rubber stamp business. I still have the vulcanizer. Hmmmm...

But for now, maybe I can make loads of variations of these little shadow boxes and put them in my Etsy store...if I get that ambitious!