I wanted to do another painting like “Carpal Splash” but instead of something white, I wanted to do something dramatically colored. I decided to use a combination of a very bright “pinkest pink” paint and black.

I also had the idea to put masking tape along this sides to create a kind of “impromptu” mold along the sides so I could mound up paint so it came up away from the edges of the painting.

Right away I made some mistakes. I was using extra heavy matte gel and I used WAY TOO MUCH “the pinkest pink” pigment and not enough white acrylic paint. I used so much that the resulting mixture was kind of hard and gritty and hard to manipulate. I used extra heavy gloss gel on the pink but only heavy matte gel on the black paint, so the black paint was MUCH more malleable. I found it was just immediately coating the pink and getting on every surface covering everything including my hands. It looked like a giant black mess, and I realized right away I’d made a serious mistake.

Then I heard Bob Ross’s voice in my head, saying “They’re not mistakes, they’re happy little accidents!” I laughed and tried to make the best of it.

I washed my hands and took some of the pink and tried to smudge it in rivers over the top of the canvas to get a little more actual pink in it. Then, as a last touch I tried just smearing some of the pure gloss gel medium on the top of some sections to see if it would create a cool shiny dimensional effect. It really just looks like a shiny weird snotty layer.

The black paint split in several places making the pink shine through, and the whole thing looks like a weird magma hellscape. All in all I mostly like it but I resolved to plan future paintings a bit more.