Painting Nightfall
I named this piece “Nightfall” as I love the contrast of the bright, almost neon-looking florals against the black-as-night background.
I never usually paint in this style but I wanted to experiment with my colours and materials differently. Let me take you through my process:
THE PAPER
I had a black cardstock lying in my paper drawer and thought I would give that a try. This black cardstock is not watercolour paper so it doesn't absorb the colours like I'm used to, rather, the paint more or less just sits on the top until it dries so it was important not to use too much water so as not to oversaturate the paper.
THE PAINTS
My usual watercolours also wouldn't work well for this technique as they are not opaque, meaning they're too transparent to show up clearly on this dark paper. Acrylics would work well for this but they are a lot thicker in consistency plus, I'm also not too familiar with using them, so the perfect go-between was gouache. I love gouache for so many reasons but one of the great things about it is that when you use gouache with barely any water, you will get a nice thick opaque look. When you use gouache with more water, it will work in a very similar way to watercolour. Gouache is the perfect material to use if you are familiar with watercolour and aren't quite used to acrylics as it's not too much of a jump. I used my paint palette tin from Caran d'Ache as well as a various mix of gouache from Winsor & Newton.
THE BRUSHES
I chose to use only two brushes for this painting. I picked a filbert brush for painting all the flowers, the brush I chose is typically used for oil and acrylic painting so I thought this would work well. I also used a round brush for all the leaves, stems and extra details.
Video Process
THE PROCESS
Painting in this style is almost like working opposite to painting flowers on white paper. Normally, we can leave off areas of paint on our white paper to represent the highlights, but on dark paper, you have to think of the dark areas as being the areas of depth and shadow and you have to add the highlights with white paint towards the end. This process is similar to how you would paint with oils or acrylics, starting with your darkest shades and working up to the lightest.
For this painting, I laid down a layer to get the structure of the flowers. As the colour dries the artwork looks really flat and uninteresting however it's about continuing to go in and add more and more layers. Towards the end, I use freshly squeezed white gouache to give the painting its brightest highlights.
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Paper -
I used something lying around my art studio but to try this again I fancy trying one of these papers
Paints -
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