And yet another month has flown by… I can’t believe it’s November already! November… and of course Riikka and I have a new Inspired by for you!

Each month Riikka and I challenge each other to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be anything really and our track record already includes films, music, paintings, fashion and even household items. Anyway… we hadn’t created with a particular colour combo in mind yet, so this time we thought it might be fun to turn Inspired by to black-and-white.

OK, so I don’t remember what exactly sparked this idea. And I have to say that I didn’t think this one through a whole lot before I started to create. I just knew I didn’t want to scrap and that I wanted to use paint. So I grabbed a canvas, a couple of black-and-white scraps and all the black-and-white paints and inks I could find.

And went to work…

I gessoed everything, covered it with layers of paint, ink, markers, modelling paste and a charcoal pencil… and ended up with this:

Seriously… I don’t even know why I bothered with the black-and-white scraps!

This was and interesting exercise. I truly had to fight the urge to add colour. I doubted the outcome so many times a long the way. I had imagined a much lighter outcome before hand. I love this Elephant March Stencil so much… I really need to practice on my brush skills! And I need to get over my fear of writing on my canvases…

If I had ended up with a lighter background, I would probably have used black for my elephant. But it didn’t and my elephant ended up white. As it turns out there are quite a lot of interesting stories and meanings associated with a white elephant.

And that’s why I love this challenge so much… Even if the subject seems quite clear-cut, I always seem to learn something new from it. Every single time!

Now hurry a long and see what Riikka’s black-and-white project looks like!