Leaf Ghost #217

At long last “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” draws to a close. I can’t believe I’ve been working on this same story since April, spanning nine leaf ghosts.

 In October I watched a string of old Vincent Price horror movies, including several of the Poe pieces he did with Roger Corman. The experience inspired me to switch my intended order up a bit. So after I finished the story, I moved on to “The Haunted Palace” (even though the Price movie had little enough to do with the Poe poem).

It was short enough to fit on the page with room to spare, so from there I went to “Hop Frog.” In addition to being one of my favorite short stories, it also formed a part of the plot of Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, another October marathon entry. And I fear another tale that looks longer than I remembered.

Leaf Ghost #216

A grey and blue ghost for a grey and rainy day. Tombow N49 and N95 background, 515 and 528 leaf and N25 shadow.

Leaf Ghost #215

In lieu of National Novel Writing Month (rest in peace), this November my project is to at least start getting my diary caught up. The last entry I wrote was in July 2022, though I have notes for most of the days since. Clearly I have a lot of work to do.

On the days when I completed a leaf ghost, I’m including a beginning-to-end set of images of the work in progress. Which of course means that I need to print out nearly 200 of these four picture strips. Just getting them set up in InDesign is taking awhile.

For today’s ghost, I want to start working with leaves that don’t look like leaves. I’m pretty sure this one started life on an oak tree, but it took some interesting twists and turns since it was a bud. It almost becomes completely abstract, which brings the project back to where it started decades ago.

I also like the color combination. Copic earth tones (E09 Burnt Sienna and E04 Lipstick Natural) have just enough red and the blue greens (BG78 Bronze and BG57 Jasper) have just enough green to make them nicely complementary.

Oh, and this is my 52nd ghost of the year, getting me to my one-per-week annual goal a couple of months early. 

 

Leaf Ghost #214

Oh so close! I predict that the next Poe ghost will see the end of our good friends Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.

The wider of the two tech pens loaded with red ink managed to clog up around halfway through. I note that its red was a shade or two lighter after I got it unclogged and replaced the ink. 

Leaf Ghost #213

One thing I like about art is that even the trash is pretty.

Every time I use gouache, I tell myself that I’m going to do a second pass and even out the brush strokes. And every time I don’t do it. At least for now, my excuse is that I’m teaching digital graphic design again, which leaves me with an inclination to be more analog on the weekends.

At this point ghost fans will be familiar with the color scheme. This time it’s Holbein acrylic gouache Carmine, Scarlet, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and Jet Black.

Also the shape and color of the leaf remind me of a lobster claw, which might be at least in part because I’ve been playing a game with lobster claws in it.

 

 

Leaf Ghost #212

Back to the recent theme: broken leaf, reds (Tombow 845 and 905) on earth tones (Tombow 977 and 991) with a mid grey drop shadow (Tombow N49).

Leaf Ghost #211

Leaf Ghost fans in general and fans of Poe Ghosts in particular may have noticed that the Poe entries arrive once out of every three times. That’s mostly due to Instagram’s three-per-row gallery of past posts. So if one in three is a Poe ghost, they line up.

It also keeps me moving on the sketchbook with the Poe series in it. This is #23, and the book has 100 pages. 

 

Leaf Ghost #210

The color theme from last time continues, this time in Japanese watercolors.

Leaf Ghost #209

This ghost memorializes the five teeth I just had removed. This seemed like the perfect leaf for the occasion, and the colors matched the mood (and the autumnal weather today) as well.

Copic colors: E57 Light Walnut, E43 Dull Ivory, R39 Garnet, R29 Lipstick Red and N8 Neutral Gray No. 8. 

Leaf Ghost #208

Okay, now Poe’s just drawing it out. Like he’s being paid by the word. Honestly, this guy is rarely at his best when he thinks he’s being funny.

Leaf Ghost #207

I do the sketches for leaf ghosts in Fresco, which is Adobe’s tablet-based offshoot of Photoshop. My routine is to create the file for the next ghost by copying the last one. In this case #206 was almost so far back in the “Recents” list that I couldn’t find it. That’s in part because I’ve been using Fresco/Photoshop to prepare graphics for the Web Design class I’m teaching starting next week (thus generating a bunch of non-ghost files), and in part because all that prep work has kept me away from the ghost drawing board for an unusually long time.

It’s been awhile since I did a Copic ghost, so this one’s the result of an experiment. As I’ve noted in several past entries, I’ve gotten frustrated with Copic markers running dry, especially the ones that I’ve recently refilled. I’d read in several sources that this problem can be avoided by storing the pens horizontally rather than vertically. This suggestion made no sense to me, as I tend to work with the brush tip and thus I figured that storing them vertically with the brush tip down would allow the ink to flow most easily on the end I’m using.

Out of frustration, I ordered a horizontal storage rack just to see if the new angle would work or not. And I have to admit that it did. All five pens flowed from beginning to end, staying fairly even throughout. Though I may just have lucked out with my pen choice, I’m optimistic that the new storage solution is indeed better.

For the record, the ink colors are V09 Violet, V04 Lilac, YR24 Pale Sepia, YR61 Spring Orange, and N8 Neutral Gray 8.

 

Leaf Ghost #206

To start the new sketchbook, I decided to try a new technique (well, new to me anyway): painting with ink. Recently I’ve noticed several artists getting good results from this technique, and I’ve got a bunch of Winsor & Newton ink sitting around and slowly drying up – in sealed bottles, no less – because I’m using Shikiori inks more frequently now.

For prep, I tried W&N Brilliant Green and Emerald undiluted, mixed with water and applied wet-on-wet. Other than the strange yellow bits in the emerald (in the ink itself rather than leftovers on the brush, as I first suspected), the results were good. I didn’t see a huge difference between mixing the ink with water in a cup and on the paper, so I opted to save some labor by watering it down before applying it to the page.

The W&N Ultramarine was suffering from the early stages of the thickening that killed my first bottle of Purple, so I added water directly to the bottle to help it flow a bit more easily. That’s the difference between the first and second tests in the bottom row.

The actual painting itself was okay. While I don’t dislike it, I don’t see a big difference between ink and watercolor for this kind of work. And given that watercolors are less temperamental, I’ll probably just stick with them in the future.

Leaf Ghost #205

“The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” continues. This is still the non-sweeps-month part of the story, but I think we’re getting closer to the place where the author reveals what the reader has known for some time.

Leaf Ghost #204

I drew this whole ghost with one pen. The third one in this lineup, to be precise.

Earlier this week I finished reading a book about lettering and calligraphy. One of the topics of the text was ruling pens, which once upon a time were in common use for drafting and other technical drawing tasks. The tips are adjustable, so each pen is capable of producing a (narrow) range of line widths. 

So I used the inks I intended to use last time, varying line thickness between the darker and lighter squares. The Shikiori flowed a bit better than the W&N, the latter producing uneven widths depending on the precise angle of the pen. At least I got the purple I was after.

This drawing is the last in Leaf Ghosts 2, a sketchbook I started more than two years ago.

My original intent was to schedule things so that the final ghost in this book would be #200, and that it would be the end of Ghost Week. Things didn’t work out that way, which is okay.

Leaf Ghost #203

I’ve worked with Shigure “Rain Showers” ink several times now (most recently on #201), and I’ve noticed that it has a slight purple hue. So I thought it would be fun to combine it with a lighter, more obviously purple ink. Winsor & Newton Purple. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that some misfortune befell my jar and the ink had entirely dehydrated.

W&N Vermilion was a reasonably good substitute. 

This one’s a mix not only of ink brands but also of pens: two different tech pens for the background, and one dip nib (two different stroke directions) for the foreground.

Leaf Ghost #202

Back to Poe. The plot thickens.

Leaf Ghost #201

Continuing with the celebration of making it past 200, some of the collection escaped their sketchbooks and found their way to the wall. I’m mentally calling this the Hall Gallery, in part because it makes it sound like some multi-million-dollar endowment at the Nelson and in part because it’s in the downstairs hall at home.

The most recent ghost uses the same pens, inks and technique as #188, only this time on grey paper.

Leaf Ghost #200

In honor of the 200th ghost, I’ve created a board on Pinterest that has every leaf ghost posted on it. It’s kinda fun to be able to see them all at once and scroll through them from beginning to current. It almost becomes a new artwork of its own.

The new ghost is also an accidental first: I used the same leaf that I used for #198. In the flurry of Ghost Week activity I must have forgotten to delete the photo from my “upcoming” folder. Oops! So I guess they’re twins, in a way.

This one’s also a reference to where it all began three and a half years ago. The colors are similar to #1, and I used the same set of Tombow markers I started with. But this one also demonstrates a few of the things I’ve learned along the way.

Leaf Ghost #199

And that was an end to Ghost Week. Usually I do maybe one ghost a week, so seven is a bunch. I managed to use all my sketchbooks except the one with grey paper. Plus a couple on illustration board.

After doing a brown painting of a green leaf for #192, it seemed fitting to do a green painting of a brown leaf for my next watercolor. The two greens turned out to be much closer together than I thought, considering that the light hue was much lighter than the dark hue in the tray.

Leaf Ghost #198

Back to airbrushing, this time with paint.

The innovation here was to create a full background and then paint the leaf on top of it. This kinda violates the philosophy behind the whole leaf ghost thing, creating the leaf as a single graphic element rather than a series of squares in common with the background.

Still, it’s hard to argue with the result. Though I enjoy all the various media and techniques I use to create leaf ghosts, I suspect that airbrushed acrylics will prove to be the biggest crowd pleasers.

And on top of the concentration and effort required to do all the masking, my cats decided to have a battle for the window seat in the studio. It’s a miracle the resulting paint spill didn’t damage anything.

Leaf Ghost #197

Back on #134 I tried watercolor on grey paper, but I’d never tried it on tan. The paper absorbed the white paint when applied wet-on-wet, but otherwise it went reasonably well. The foreground is crimson applied straight out of the tube as well as mixed with white.

Leaf Ghost #196

After the last couple of days, I wanted to do a ghost that wouldn’t require a lot of prep or mid-process adaptation. Gambling that the pens in my old Stabilo collection would have enough ink for a whole drawing, I opted to give them a go.

None of them ran out of ink, so that was good. My only gripe was that reds 40 and 50 were so similar that the foreground doesn’t have much contrast. In comparison, blues 41 and 51 in the background were quite different.

Leaf Ghost #195

The same colors as I used yesterday, this time using the markers directly. Well, more or less the same colors. Royal Blue petered out, so I finished with Ultramarine. And I used the greys as I intended to yesterday rather than how it ended up working.

Leaf Ghost #194

As temperamental as Copic markers can be when used as markers, they’re even worse when used with their airbrush tool. It seems like such a good idea in principle: the effect of an airbrush without extensive cleanup between colors. But alas, there’s no reliable way to predict which colors will work and which won’t (even Copic itself admits that results vary). So combinations depend entirely on what markers actually do something when inserted into the brush tool.

But wait, it gets better. After running tests, I settled on Cool Grey 3 for the lighter background color. But once everything was masked up and ready to go, the marker refused to work in the brush tool. So I switched to Neutral Grey 8, with a lighter (and apparently more spattering) application to keep it from being too dark.

 I was also hoping to use Spring Orange for the foreground, figuring that overfilling it for #168 would at least mean that it would have plenty of ink for airbrush use. And yet it didn’t work at all.

Plus Cool Grey 3 started working again, so I used it for the drop shadow.

Despite the chaos in the production, the result was good. The one lesson I took away (other than what I already knew about Copics) was that I need to develop a lighter touch with the Xacto when cutting masks. I ended up digging some deep trenches in the board.

Leaf Ghost #193

Welcome to Ghost Week 2025. 

I was nervous about leading off with a Poe ghost, as these often take more than a day of off-again-on-again work to complete. And of course the idea behind Ghost Week is one piece per day. But I figured that if I took breaks to do something else between rows that I could get it done.

As it turned out, I finished the whole thing in a single sitting. Maybe it’s just easier to concentrate in the summer.

The good doctor and professor continue.

Leaf Ghost #192

Back home, continuing with watercolors.

The funny thing here is that the leaf that modeled for this one was green, and yet in the painting it’s turned brown.

Leaf Ghost #191

More settled in now, and using colors I know will work with wet and dry application.

This also got me to wondering about the rules of plein aire painting. I’m outside, far away from my studio. Using watercolors. Painting something I saw in my environment. Does it matter that it isn’t a landscape?

I’m also pleased to note that it’s actually easier to apply water to the paper when the sketchbook is flat. The water stays put a little better, and it’s easier to see with bright sunlight at an angle. Which is great, because it means I don’t have to drag the easel with me next year.

By the way, that’s cranberry juice in the glass, not paint water.

Leaf Ghost #190

Caboose Week gets underway a day later than expected. It took me a day to get settled in, and even when I sat down to paint I had trouble easing into it. My original intent was to work with two colors, alternating wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet. But the yellow I started with spread more like ink than watercolor, so I switched to four colors on dry so the saturation would match.

I also intended to put a red leaf on a orange/yellow background, sticking with the color scheme from last time. But something pushed me toward blue, so that's where I ended up.

Leaf Ghost #189

Back to gouache for the first time in awhile. The colors are all Acryla: Deep Yellow and Lemon Yellow for the background, Carmine and Scarlet for the leaf, and Lamp Black for the shadow.

 This is my favorite combination of hue, saturation and brightness: lighter colors that contrast strongly for the background and darker colors that are much closer together for the leaf.

 

Leaf Ghost #188

Same pens and ink as #186, this time cross-hatched.

 I’ve noted in several previous entries that photos taken with my iPhone tend not to reproduce subtle changes in color. To prove my case, I took a close up (above) and adjusted it in Photoshop to bring out the difference in shades between the starts and ends of strokes.