Keeping track of progress on creative projects
Four out of the five markers I used for this one were freshly refilled. That’s Copic Y18 Lightning Yellow, Y13 Lemon Yellow, BG13 Aqua and the C5 Cool Grey #5 shadow. Only the darker foreground – BG49 Duck Blue – wasn’t a refill.
It shows in the drawing as less distinct marker lines, especially in the lighter yellow squares. And it strongly bled through the paper.
Today’s ghost technique was something I wasn’t at all sure would work. But JetPens assured me it was a thing, and I trust them.
Back during Ghost Week I used watercolor paint with a dip pen, and it worked as well as ink. But the paint back in June was from a tube, mixed with water in a small cup. So dipping the nib into it was pretty much the same as using ink.
As ghost fans already know, lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with gansai watercolors from pans. They’re beautiful, but there isn’t really a convenient way to dip a nib into a shallow pan. That’s where JetPens’ helpful suggestion entered the picture: use a brush to load paint onto the nib.
Assuming I would need to have a flat space on my left for the paint, I had to wait until the last model cleared the table in my art space. However, once I was underway I found that the pen needed reloading infrequently enough that it wasn’t a huge interruption to switch hands while refilling. So I could keep the paint to my right, a lucky thing because the portable easel I had on the table was being difficult.
The previous watercolor pen combo used two colors at two different line widths. This time I kept all the line widths narrow but used four colors (Ultramarine and Ultramarine Pale in back, Sap Green Deep and Sap Green in front). The result was exactly the combination I like: lighter colors with distinct differences in the background, darker colors with lower contrast for the leaf.
Like the Monitor half of the previous kit, this one was a straightforward build without an excessive number of tricky steps. Were there super tiny pieces? Did I end up looking for some of them on the floor? Yes, of course. But overall this was a fun build.
Added bonus: World War One is one of my special interests, so I found this kit fascinating not just as something to build but also as something I’d read about. Kinda fun to have this historical reference perched on the bookshelf above my desk.
I can practically hear the Civil War nerds griping that the ship on the left is actually the CSS Virginia, but I opted to go with the more widely known name because it’s the one Metal Earth used for the name of the two-boat kit.
Of the two, the Monitor was considerably easier to build. The parts in general fit better together, and it required four pages of instructions rather than its partner’s 12. Plus the Monitor was a childhood favorite of mine.
That said, both models had a lot of tiny parts, some of which inevitably hit the floor. So pretty typical Metal Earth experiences.
For a ghost that was mostly intended as experimental, I ended up really liking the combination of colors and techniques.
The background is a wet-on-wet blend of Kuretake Gansai watercolor Cadmium Red and Cadmium Yellow. Usually when I do this particular trick, the combination is a color straight out of the pan for the dark squares and watered down for the light squares. The red proved to be somewhat temperamental, but the orange went on more smoothly.
The leaf is the most complex acrylic blend I’ve tried so far. The light squares are a combination of Chromium Oxide Green, Chromium Cerulean Blue, Titanium White and high flow medium. The dark squares are the same mix with three dabs of Bone Black added. I should probably have stopped at two. I’m finding that I get the best illusion of transparency from colors that are just different enough to tell them apart without changing shade or hue beyond that.
The leaf colors are also an experiment for another project, where they’ll probably show up a little lighter and with more medium.
The last thing I’d ever want to do is drag petty politics into the leaf ghost project. And yet given the current thread of the Poe series, I can’t help but note that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is at this point either a.) hospitalized for a month after a minor fall, b.) already dead but being lied about due to some chicanery with the upcoming election, or c.) merely dead but not yet really most sincerely dead thanks to extraordinary medical intervention.
In any event, M. Valdemar has now passed away.
Or has he?
I started work on this model literally years ago. Inspired by the non-Metal-Earth kit I recently finished, I thought I’d give this one another try. Though I’m a bit out of practice, it came back to me fairly quickly.
One thing I noted was that with work like this it actually helped to not listen to music while I was putting it together. Back when I first started, I tried playing soundtracks from the Lord of the Rings movies. I swiftly figured out that most of it was the same three or four themes adapted over and over again for hours on end. When I resumed, I tried some classical favorites. But honestly just quiet worked as well if not better.
Barad Dur probably won’t be the next model I build, but I hope to get to it sooner rather than later. I need it to balance out the space on my bookshelf across from where this one now resides.
