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.

 

Leaf Ghost #187

Dr. Tarr and company continue.

Sometimes I mess the language up. Poe will use a well-crafted, 19th century turn of a phrase, and I’ll accidentally replace it with its 21st century equivalent. Alas, no practical way to erase or otherwise undo with these things.