Leaf Ghost #244

One of the emerging trends in leaf ghosts is the use of more subtle distinctions between foreground and background. For example, most recently I used different saturation levels of the same hue. This is the opposite: different hues at similar intensities. The leaf is my beloved cool shadow / ice ocean combo, and the background is levels 1 and 3 of the cool grey range.

C3 started running low on ink around midway through. Though I refilled it, apparently I should have either waited for the ink to seep into the tip or applied some ink directly to the tip. On the one hand, not exactly the look I was going for. On the other hand, as the darker grey fades from top to bottom, it gets closer to the lighter grey until there isn’t much of a contrast at all. 

Leaf Ghost #243

This starts with background inspiration from #233. Though the background there was Crimson Lake from my Koi portable set, I thought it looked a lot like Rose Madder from the Kuretake set. So that’s where I began today. And then for the foreground I used Rose Madder Deep, making this my first experiment with using two different paints of the same general hue. Also kinda interesting how neither of them in their pans look much like the colors they become on the paper.

For awhile when I was a kid I wanted to be a forensic pathologist when I grew up. This was due in part to the popularity of Quincy M.E. and probably also due in part to me being a morbid little tween. I think the fascination still lingers in the back of my mind, as this color combination suggests to me a microscope slide of a tissue sample.

Leaf Ghost #242

The Copic-specific sketchbook I started working on three years ago is now full. As the cover indicates, this is the third sketchbook I’ve filled with leaf ghosts. Though there was nothing wrong with this paper, there also wasn’t anything remarkable about it. So I’ll probably resume doing Copic ghosts in the main sketchbook.

To bookend things, I went back to the colors I used for #77. Well, more or less. YG21 had run dry. But the rest of them worked nicely, and C3 grey stepped in to supply the subtle shadow. 

Leaf Ghost #241

Ghost Week concludes with a trickier project: airbrushing with tube acrylics.

Predictably, the main challenge was to find a way to thin the paint so it wouldn’t clog the brush. For the background hues (raw and burnt sienna) I used a thinner designed specifically for airbrushes. The results weren’t perfect, but they at least suggested possibilities. 

Insert “why can’t anyone cook sienna just right?” joke here. 

I mixed water into burnt umber for the foreground, and the paint turned patchy (as it did yesterday when I tried the same thing with traditional brushes). Here it was kind of a fun effect, though.

One of the big advantages to working with acrylics is that they’re opaque and will cover the layers beneath them. So I was able to paint the entire frame with the lighter background color and then mask for a chessboard of the darker background color on top of it.

This also allowed me to do all of the pencil sketching on the masking film rather than drawing lines on the board itself.

Leaf Ghost #240

A new medium this time: tube acrylics.

Recently I’ve been doing some reading about acrylics, and I decided to get a set of colors recommended by one of the books I read. I even improvised a set of hooks for them on a bookshelf in my art space.

The texture will take some getting used to. I’ve used liquid acrylics several times in the past, but the thicker stuff mixes differently and goes onto the paper much differently. I also learned that trying to thin it with water doesn’t work very well. So clearly I have some more learning to do.

On the other hand, I like the color combination. This does a nice job of creating the illusion of transparency that’s important to the whole leaf ghost thing.

Leaf Ghost #239

Here’s a first: watercolor paint applied with a dip pen. The drawing technique is the same as #181, here using paint rather than ink. I was surprised at how little difference there was between the two media. It’s an encouraging step, as it’s easier to blend colors with paint than it is with ink.

I also notice that on the thicker lines the paint tended to pool a bit at the bottom of each stroke (toward the top once the paper is rotated 90 degrees from how I drew it to what it’s supposed to look like).  

Leaf Ghost #238

Valdemar continues.

I find the leaf particularly hard to see in this one, even when face to face with the original rather than trying to view it via this photo. It’s a shorter, wider leaf with irregular edges, two factors that work against visibility in the Poe series.