A little Darkness never hurts

I've been up all night, creating, packaging traded mail art to new homes, working on 3 different projects an hour here, an hour there. And then it occurred to me that October was almost over and I hadn't done Michelle's GPP Street Team Challenge #34, which was to start with a black journal page.

Since I had my inks and embossing powders already out, I decided to use them. I took my Ranger Inksentials white gel pen, hurriedly wrote what was on my mind in a stream-of-consciousness way, unedited and in very sloppy handwriting, until the page was filled with white cursive. Then I rubbed in some watersoluble oil pastels, and stamped over that with pigment inks and heat embossed.

I like the results so much that I scanned it in to use in the future as a background. Click on the photo to enlarge it -- you can really see all the embossing and different colors. And if you like it, you are more than welcome to snag it for yourself. It's my Dark Side gift to you.

It seems like only yesterday it was the beginning of the month -- time is moving much faster to me than it used to -- and I had planned to do dry pastels or embossing ink and Perfect Pearls for the challenge. So much for that.

I still want to do dry chalk pastels on black paper someday soon. I recently read you can *burn them in* with rubbing alcohol so that they won't rub off. Don't know if that is true, haven't tried it yet (I did manage to have fun doing that with a charcoal pencil the other day, though, so the alcohol does do something along those lines).

Black paper definitely has possiblities I never seem to remember to utilize. I'm glad I took a few moments to *Challenge 34* myself and Come Over to the Dark Side. :-)))