I usually paint on canvas or panel. Until recently, I have not had significant experience working with either oil or acrylic paints on paper. This year I began experimenting with acrylics and water color paper. I decided to do a series of simple bouquets of flowers in vases. I started with tearing a large sheet of Arches paper into fourths so that my paintings were 8 1/2 x 10 ½-inches. I gessoed the paper, applied random paint marks all over in my favorite colors and then used a negative space technique, thereby forming a silhouette. I filled in the background color leaving the shape of the vases and flowers.

 The Finished Product

Since I had already applied the original colors for the vases and flowers, I had little left to do except finish the details of the flowers and create shadows in the appropriate places on the paper. It was an easy and fun technique and one that I will use again in the future. After finishing the paintings, I matted them with an outer border of 11×14-inches for easy framing. Here are the results: