Raven Black

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was to use black.  I know a lot of artists who avoid black, including some who think black should never form part of an artist’s palette, but I am not one of them.  You may have noted that I use black a lot.  In fact, I have no doubt that black and grey probably feature more in my artwork than any other colours (and, yes, I know black isn’t technically a colour but whatever).  I like to use it along with a pop of colour.  It’s kind of one of my jams.  I am quite comfortable working in monochrome.  It may be partly laziness and partly down to limitations of time but I like working with a very limited palette.  All of which is to say that for me to use black was not much of a challenge really.  My challenge, therefore, was to create visual interest and texture while only using black and grey.  I used the Ecoline liquid watercolour used in my previous art journal page for the background.  Once I added the black, I realised what a warm grey it is but I opted to use it because I liked the way it pooled to create blossoms and blooms for a bit of soft visual texture.  To create the visual texture on the figure’s clothing, I did the old sprinkle salt onto wet watercolour trick.  I went entirely overboard with the salt, however, as I was rushing to get out the door to my youngest son’s Open House night at school.  Better than ingesting that quantity of salt I suppose but it was definitely too much.  No time to even attempt to rectify my action, of course, so I let it be.  It definitely resulted in visual texture, that’s for sure.