Still life on black paper

My attempt at still life realism.

To be honest, I did this only to see if I could. Doing realism is a fascinating study - it's how well you can follow what you see vs what you think you see. If you stare at a zoomed in photo, everything is in abstract shapes, and your brain screams "that's not what water looks like!" So it's a fight against your natural impulses to draw what your brain thinks something should look like, and believing that the final drawing will look realistic if you just faithfully follow the shapes and colours.

I've found that Caran d'Ache Luminance coloured pencils are unmatched when it comes to drawing on black paper. The pigment shines through the dark, unlike the Polychromos which shows up dull (if it shows up at all). Every time I draw on black paper, I have this urge to run out and buy every single Luminance pencil. Sigh.

The pencil that got the most use in this picture is my Derwent Lightfast white pencil. It's the most opaque white pencil I have since I don't have the Luminance white pencil.

Even then, the black paper does absorb a lot of the white light so I still had to finish off the brightest white highlights with a Sakura white gel pen.

I wouldn't have been able to draw this six months ago, so it's quite gratifying to know that all that daily drawing has seen progress. I've said (only about 100 times) that I love drawing on black paper. I might draw a series of everyday objects on black paper. Just cos I think it'll be fun.