Leaf Ghost #137

Back to Copics. These are the same colors as Leaf Ghost #48 only reversed. And the shadow is Cool Grey 5.

Leaf Ghost #136

Same pens, same inks, this time on tan paper. Drop shadow done entirely with hatching using the narrower tip.

Leaf Ghost #135

Same inks and pens as #133, only with the colors reversed.

The experiment here was to do the drop shadow with lines while the work was in progress rather than using markers or watercolors at the end. Seemed to work. Would do again.

Leaf Ghost #134

I recently saw an exhibit at the Nelson about watercolor technique. I wish they’d do more of this sort of thing, as I found it interesting and inspirational. I was particularly fond of "Italian Hills" by Arthur Bowen Davies, so I thought I’d try applying his technique to a leaf ghost.

Ghost geometry produces a much different look and feel from a landscape, but it was still a fun experiment. This is also my first time working in mixed media with both watercolor (background) and gouache (foreground).

Leaf Ghost #133

So lots of firsts here.

The main one is the use of text as the main graphic element. Appropriately enough, the story is Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” While working, I referred to the entry in It Takes Every Word, a lit anthology (complete with writing prompts) I put together and illustrated several years ago.

I used Winsor & Newton Deep Red and Black India loaded into Rapidograph tech pens (0.35 and 0.7 mm, one for each color for a total of four pens). I’ve used line width variation before, and I also used tech pens recently. But this is my first time combining colors and widths exactly this way.

Of course with the image also being a story, the only way to do it was to go line by line, copying the text and switching pens each time the hue or brightness changed. More than once I found myself wishing I was working with something less temperamental than tech pens.

This is also my first time working with pens on illustration board. I guess I could have used a sketchbook, but somehow I sensed that I might want this one to be more of a stand-alone.

One more first: I’d never used the same pen for the art and the caption at the bottom.

Leaf Ghost #132

Fans of the leaf ghost series may recognize this color combination from #105. However, this is Koh-I-Noor Scarlet rather than Winsor & Newton Deep Red.

So this ghost is an ink test, both to see whether the color was good and also whether cleanup would be easy. Yes and no.

The color is a darker red that looks a little like dried blood, which will make it perfect for an upcoming ghost. Unfortunately it was a colossal pain to clean off the dip pen nib. Neither water nor alcohol completely removed it, so I had to resort to paint thinner. And that makes it unusable for the future project I have in mind, because I’ll use tech pens for that and they’re hard enough to clean even when the ink isn’t stubborn.

But that’s okay. The W&N ink looks pretty much the same, and it dissolves easily with water.

Leaf Ghost #131

These are the same Copic colors as last time, only this time I applied them with the markers directly rather than with the airbrush tool.

I also alternated colors from row to row (more or less) rather than doing all of one color at once. I’ve noticed in the past that some markers tend to dry up a little after a few minutes of constant use, so I thought I’d see if giving them a break between rows might help. Turned out it didn’t make much difference. BG78 Bronze in particular weakened as I went (compare the upper left to the lower right), while the other background color (BG57 Jade) fared better.

Both the blues I used for the leaf stayed strong for the whole time. This is the difference I’d expect for two nearly identical hues and shades: B28 Royal Blue and B29 Ultramarine. They were much farther apart in the airbrushed ghost.

Also Ultramarine was the first color I chose, in honor of it being W&N’s color story of the week. The rest just naturally fell into place after testing what markers did and didn’t work with the new tool.