What a rainy morning can bring.

I couldn't quite like to paint on black paper in class,

while many of my fellow students were very excited. So the other day I found it was time to do another try. No expectations and no rules, my approach was to let loose and let the imagination and intuition take control.

What an adventure! I found myself both excited and thrilled. I used Clear Tar Gel from Golden to, quite
randomly, make the outlines of my rose. I wanted it to be a loose style rose and concidered it all to be a test. I let the gel dry well before getting on with paint. All my color choices were made by intuition. The reason all the lines are so black is the paper. The gel is clear but shiny, and makes it look like black paint. Have a look at the photo below, can you see it looks like fabric in the background?

With the paint dry, I added pan pastel to the background. One layer of Ultramarine Blue. I spent a long time concidering whether to stop at this stage, but my curiosity won and I added a final layer.

I used different colors of pastels and made lines. I think these lines add movement to my piece, but I'm not sure if this was the best piece to add them to. But, the flower stand out well because of it's shimmer. To use pastels together with Twinks is a fantastic combination. They both accentuate one another well, and it creates lots of  interest.

So far I've learnt many new things and I'm definitely going to do more of this. Suddenly black paper became an interesting substrate for me. Isn't it strang how little it takes to make a big difference?

By the way, can you see that the line work is a little inspired by Van Gogh.
Thanks for stopping by, I hope you've enjoyed your visit.