A notebook with black or blue pages is a little intimidating at first, because you don't know what deserves the first page. These ten ideas come from people who already work on dark paper, from astronomers to drawing teachers, and almost all of them can be done with the white gel pen that comes in the box.
- A test page. Start on the last page: one line with every pen, marker and pencil you own, with its name beside it. In ten minutes you know what shows, what takes a while to dry and what isn't worth carrying.
- Tonight's sky. Amateur astronomers sketch on black paper because the drawing looks the way the eyepiece does, white dots on a dark field. You don't need a telescope. Go outside, pick a patch of sky and mark the stars you can see, bigger dots for the brighter ones.
- The Moon by its lit side. Draw only what is lit and let the paper do the shadow. That's how Erika Rix, who writes about astronomical sketching, explains it: white pencil for the sunlit area, and the shadows form themselves.
- A sphere of light. It's the exercise from drawing classes on black paper: a circle, strong white where the light hits and less and less toward the shadow, leaving the darkest part untouched. After three tries you understand why it changes the way you see.
- A plan in blue. White lines on a blue ground was how architectural plans were copied for almost a century. On a cobalt blue page, the layout of your room, the studio you'd like to have or an invented city looks like an official document.
- A phrase in chalkboard letters. Write it in cursive, thicken the downstrokes and add a shadow line to the right of and below each letter. It's the technique behind chalk signs.
- A month on one page. Instead of a calendar, one circle per day, and you fill in the day you did what you meant to: read, draw, go for a run. Some people who journal on black pages use the moon instead: one small moon per night, drawn as it looks.
- Botanicals in white line. A leaf, a branch or a flower in outline only, no shading. If a line gets away from you, on black pages a black marker covers it.
- An album. In the early 1900s many photo albums had black pages. Glue in tickets, photos or clippings and write the caption in white ink.
- Colors that look lit up. On a dark page a pale yellow, a turquoise or a light pink really stand out. Try a neon sign, fireworks or a city at night, with a light layer of white underneath and the color on top.
Any dark-paged notebook works for all of these. Ours is one color all the way through, with black or cobalt blue pages, 17.6 × 24.5 cm and 160 blank pages. See the notebook, and if you're not sure what to write with, read which pens work on black and colored paper.
Sources: Erika Rix in Astronomy magazine, Proko's Drawing With Light lesson, lettering.org on chalkboard lettering, LancasterHistory on photo albums and Chris Wilson on colored pencils on black paper.