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.