This painting started out with a solid surface… the wooden bottom of a serving tray whose handles were falling off. No need to buy canvas when the world’s full of stuff to be painted on! :-) Then I proceeded with a coat of solid gray/tannish paint I had left over from painting my studio walls. Before that dried I started to paint the flames - fun! The texture was worked in gradually, lots of granular medium (the stuff you buy in art stores to stretch your paint and/or achieve specific texture or surface), sand and saw dust. This is one of those things you just have to experiment with, no right or wrong way to do it. The dancer started out as a vision… then I found the perfect picture in a magazine for reference. Well, reference is great… but my sense of proportion of the human body is pretty much way warped so I decided to plunk my reference straight onto the ‘canvas’ and painted over it. Beats tracing onto already bumpy background! If you do this, make sure to paint heavily, make it your own, so that the outcome doesn’t resemble the original too much, otherwise please give credit to the photographer. :-))