Leaf Ghost #40

One more leaf ghost before the end of the year. I returned to the green-on-brown color scheme, this time in gouache.

Model – Event Horizon

Awhile back Ken bought two resin-printed models of the Event Horizon, the spaceship from the movie of the same name. Though the source was an uneven experience, the ship itself was visually fun.

He and I did the bulk of the painting on our models last summer, so it’s taken me this long to make up my mind about how to finish it. I bought some specialized colors with the intent of painting the model to match the images in the movie posters. But after careful re-examination, I decided that most of the weird colors were intended to be tricks of the light rather than the actual surface tones. 

So I added some spots for running lights, touched up a few small details, and called it done.

Leaf Ghost #39

Before I get started on the most recent leaf ghost, I want to at least mention a quick side project I completed this morning. I don’t think it merits an entry all its own, but it deserves to be noted.

Many years ago I wanted to make my own custom picture frames. I never got any farther than cutting boards down into thin strips, which of course left me with several narrow pieces of wood. It occurred to me that they might make a good stand for my Winsor & Newton inks, a theory confirmed when they turned out to be the perfect width for the small square-bottomed bottles. So I cut them to the right length, stuck them together with wood glue, and voila!

The new arrangement arrived just in time to help provide a new home for the new W&N inks I got for Christmas. The new set included violet, blue and scarlet. Combined with the purple and black I already had, they were everything I needed for Leaf Ghost #39.

This is the first time I ever crosshatched all the squares on a leaf ghost. Here I was able to make it work because I had different colors for the background and foreground, so nothing had to be hatched, left blank or spaced farther apart.

Of course that also made it more time consuming than drawing with simpler methods. But it produced the best results I've gotten with dip pens so far. The extra effort is also pleasantly meditative.

The first pass I did was violet (the darker of the two background colors). Apparently I missed a tiny drop of water on my wrist after I cleaned the nib, because I ended up with an annoying smudge (row 4 column 4).

Leaf Ghost #38

Cold, snowy day, a good excuse to stay at home and draw. I listened to my playlist of seasonal music while I worked, the drawing and the soundtrack taking almost exactly the same amount of time.

Sticking with green-on-brown color schemes, this is Tombow water-based markers: 969 chocolate, 947 burnt sienna, 245 sap green, and 195 light green.

Leaf Ghost #37

Same color combination as the last one, but this time dip pens. Winsor & Newton Brilliant Green and Peat Brown.

I think the full page coverage is an improvement over leaving the light squares of the background blank. It takes longer to do. But that’s actually a good thing, as the pen and ink ones are more meditative than practical to begin with.

Leaf Ghost #36

I’m developing some real affection for Copic markers. Three reasons:

1. They produce great results. I love how vivid the colors are.

2. They’re easy to work with. Zero prep. Zero clean-up. They produce solid coverage rapidly, allowing me to take a leaf ghost from start to finish much more swiftly than with any other tools I’m currently using. Though time isn’t of the essence, sometimes it’s nice to not spend hours on a piece.

3. The bleed-through to the other side of the page is almost as good as the picture itself.

Leaf Ghost #35

I hadn’t used gouache for a leaf ghost for awhile, and I thought it might be fun to do an all-dark background, with tones closer to each other in brightness. I’m pleased with the result and will likely take this approach again in the future.

The colors are all Holbein gouache straight out of the tube: navy, cobalt, carmine and scarlet (lamp black for the shadow).

Luca took no interest in the painting but proved to be good company nonetheless.

Metal Earth Model – Voyager

My 26th Metal Earth build. Normally I wouldn’t do two spacecraft in a row, but last week a friend and I started binge watching Star Trek movies, and the first one put me in a Voyager mood.

Voyager 1 is farther away from Earth than any other human-made object. It entered interstellar space back in 2012. And NASA is still communicating with it. They don’t expect it to stop transmitting until 2025. Not bad for something launched way back in 1977.

Leaf Ghost #34

Festive holiday colors to start the festive holiday season. Winsor & Newton Scarlet, Brilliant Green and a Deep Red shadow.

Leaf Ghost #33

Back to firsts. This is my first try with Koi water-based markers. They worked pretty much the same as the Tombow markers, so I’m pleased with the result. That’s XBR-237 Light Sky Blue, XBR-125 Sky Blue, XBR-130 Sap Green, XBR-27 Yellow Green, and XBR-49 Black.

I made a handful of mistakes, which you can spot if you look closely. I guess I got distracted by the impending end of the Thanksgiving break. Still, it was nice to complete one more creative project before the end of the month.

This was also a mini milestone of sorts: I’ve reached the midway point in the sketchbook I’m using for leaf ghosts. It has 60 pages, so I should have made it to the middle three ghosts ago. But I’ve done three of them using paper and board outside the sketchbook.

Leaf Ghost #32

It’s been a year of many firsts for the leaf ghost project, but this entry is a last. I’ve decided to stop using Noodler’s Ink. I used Dragon’s Napalm, Black and Blue, and Black for this ghost, and when I was done I threw the lot of it out (along with a bottle of Sequoia Green).

My primary motivation for the move was the controversy surrounding the labeling of some of the company’s products. I was also disappointed in Noodler’s response to the problem. A lot of its renaming struck me as passive-agressively petulant. I don’t know these folks personally, so for all I know they may not actually be malicious right wingers. But at the very least this whole mess represents a lapse in taste that drags politics into the realm of art supplies.

I’m a big fan of political art. I’m even capable of appreciating the design skills of artists with whom I ideologically disagree. But when I sit down in my creative space to work on something peaceful and meditative such as a leaf ghost, I don’t want my art supplies reminding me of the tense, contentious mess all around us constantly that I’m trying to shut out for at least a little while.

That said, I admit I’ve also had technical issues with Noodler’s stuff. It’s designed for fountain pens, which might have something to do with the trouble I’ve had getting it to flow evenly using dip nibs. And though I don’t know this for a fact, I suspect it’s best suited for paper types other than the mix media sketchbook I’m using for most entries in the leaf ghost series.

If nothing else, I get annoyed with its tendency to smear. The green in particular took forever to dry. This one wasn’t too bad. I got a little smudging from the red, and the black would have made a mess if I hadn’t saved it for last and been careful to avoid getting it on my hands while I was working.

It’s a shame, too. The label art on the Noodler’s Ink I bought was what first drew me to it. The colors are good (assuming one uses it for pen work rather than applying it with a brush). This should have been much better than it was.

Earworm – All alone at the ’64 World’s Fair

Continuing the tradition started with the last earworm, I’m not going to be coy about the source. This is from “Ana Ng” by They Might Be Giants. Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos about Disney theme parks, and references to the “Small World” ride always remind me of this song.

The obvious inspiration is Mary Blair’s design work for the ride and other Disney properties. But I wanted it to look cold and commercial rather than warm and human like her watercolors.

The text proved tricky. My original plan was to use Stenciletta, which has separate faces for the left and right sides as well as the full characters. But to my chagrin, I found that the sides didn’t match up precisely.

 

So I switched to Phosphate and did the slicing and coloring manually.

I drew the doll heads myself and used Adobe’s skin tone swatches to vary their colors.

Metal Earth Model – Chandra X-Ray Observatory

My 25th Metal Earth build. Here’s a link to an excellent site about the real thing and the astrophysicist it’s named after.

This model had something I’ve been wanting from an ME kit: the trickiest part of the assembly was at the beginning. Sure, there’s a stage at the end where eight pins have to fit in place at once. But the tough part was getting the B4 and B5 pieces to bend and attach correctly. I also ended up putting on A29 sideways, which I didn’t notice until it was too late to do anything about it.

Otherwise this was a straightforward, relaxing assembly.

Leaf Ghost #31

Earlier this year I did some color testing with bottles of Higgins ink that I found in a container in my basement (right after I bought a bunch of new ink, naturally). But I just now noticed that I hadn’t used them for an actual leaf ghost. The green is green, but the brown turned out to be more of a reddish grey.

I know some of the other media I work with produce more visually dramatic results. But I find the ink-only pieces more psychologically soothing to create. There’s just something meditative about all those repetitive lines. Add some soft music, and it’s a great segue between a difficult semester and a much-needed Thanksgiving break.

Leaf Ghost #30

This one went all kinds of crazy. As a result, I learned a lot from it.

My original intent was to pay tribute to all the bright red leafs on the trees right now. So I decided to start with a solid watercolor leaf and then use ink to create the standard ghost effect. So basically like Leaf Ghost #21, only instead of airbrushing the watercolor I decided to wet-on-wet paint it with Art Creation Scarlet.

So the first lesson of the day was a reminder to work top to bottom. I ended up smearing a mess of still wet paint at the base of the stem, with the smudge going all the way past the bottom of the sketch. At an earlier stage in the project, I would have written this off as a loss. But this afternoon I found it kinda awesome. The result looked like a cross between a crime scene and a Rorschach blot.

I almost just left it the way it was. But then I decided to try some more subtle tricks with the ink. I used Winsor & Newton Sunshine Yellow for the background, starting with a tight cross-hatch at the top and then adding more space between the lines for each row going down. The result varies depending on how you look at it (literally rather than figuratively). If you see a smaller version of the image – or if I take my glasses off – the yellow fades from top to bottom. In a larger, more detailed view, the lines with more negative space around them actually stand out more prominently than the tighter patterns higher in the composition.

The ink on the leaf itself (Winsor & Newton Deep Red) follows the same cross-hatch patterns. Toward the top it disappears into the paint almost entirely, while at the bottom it’s much more visible. I did the shadow in the same color, and there it looks like dried blood (playing along with the crime scene theme).

I will definitely try this watercolor technique again, though I’ll try to be more careful about smearing next time. Though the fading effect is interesting, I’ll likely go back to inks that stand out against the paint rather than blending in.

Leaf Ghost #29

A brown autumn leaf on a wet sidewalk on a rainy day. Transformed into its former vibrant colors amid swimming pool blue. A brief meditation on a season gone by.

Tombow water-based markers for the first time since Leaf Ghost #1. The inks are 451 Sky Blue and 452 Process Blue for the background, 192 Asparagus and 177 Dark Jade for the leaf, and N25 Lamp Black for the shadow.

I should have done a better job cleaning my straight edge after the last marker ghost, as there was some leftover orange that bled into the blue (visible in row 5 column 2).

Leaf Ghost #28

I wasn’t going to start a new ghost so quickly on the heels of the last one. But after more than an hour straight of listening to one of my neighbors run a leaf blower, I needed something to soothe my nerves that could be done while wearing noise-canceling headphones.

From the Winsor & Newton ink set I bought earlier this year, the only two colors I hadn’t tried yet were Sunshine Yellow and Ultramarine. I feel like they made a good combination.

Leaf Ghost #27

Orange and black in honor of the upcoming holiday. Or Holbein orange gouache and Art Creation grey watercolor, to be more precise.

So what did I learn this time around?

This is the first time that I created the dark squares by filling them completely with the background color and then painting over them with the foreground color. Gouache is opaque enough to make it work.

My first attempt at a dark orange mix came out way too dark. Even though I put only a small drop of lamp black in a good-sized dollop of orange, it still came out as an extremely dark brown that wouldn’t have stood out against the background at all. So I set it aside and started over, this time dipping my brush directly into the black tube and then mixing it with orange. Better.

I repurposed my first mistake by using it for the drop shadow. I used it only on the light squares, going with black for the dark squares. This is the first time I’ve used different colors for the shadow. The results aren’t super dramatic, mostly because the black gouache doesn’t stand out against the dark grey background. But it’s filed in the back of my head for future iterations.

This ghost also marks the end of the first roll of artist’s masking tape I bought earlier this year. I’ve learned some lessons practicing with the stuff, most importantly to be less timid about it. At the outset I worried about it lifting paint off the surface if I pressed it down too hard, and as a result I got a fair amount of seepage under the edges. Paint still seeps here and there, but it’s typically easy to retouch at the end.

Pausing between rounds of masking to let things dry is typically enough to keep the tape from damaging the paint or the paper. So now I press it down after I apply it. Seems to be working.

At the end of this roll I also learned that the tape that presses directly against the cardboard center has more (or different) glue on it. It’s best to go ahead and throw that out rather than trying to use every last inch, because that part of the tape left some residue on the surface.

I was also pleasantly surprised that the wet-on-dry watercolor didn’t seep under the tape edges at all.

Leaf Ghost #26

Earlier this week I (virtually) attended a session at Adobe MAX in which Spencer Nugent was the guest of honor. The session inspired me to re-read his book about working with markers, which in turn inspired me to give them another chance.

The last time I tried Copic markers was Leaf Ghost #5. Back then I was dissatisfied with the uneven results. But since then I’ve come to embrace the analog nature of working with physical media.

Before I started, I made a color test page with the various markers I was considering. I was fairly sure at the outset that I wanted to use E09 Burnt Sienna and YR68 Orange for the leaf, but I was less certain about the background.

As a side note, using familiar text for testing is a habit I acquired as a youthful type nerd poring through U&LC.

I ended up going with BG72 Ice Ocean and BG10 Cool Shadow. They combined nicely with the foreground colors. The shadow is E77 Maroon.

Once the pencil sketch was in place, I used a straight edge to do the outsides of the squares. Then I did the leaf edges and filled in the rest, doing everything for one color before moving on to the next.

Unlike last time, I’m pleased with the result. I was also pleased with the process. It’s nice to be able to move from color to color instantly without doing a lot of clean-up between steps.

Leaf Ghost #25

“The fuscia’s gone. I couldn’t face the fuscia all alone.” - Garden of Love by Benny Hill.

This morning’s leaf ghost opened a new bottle of ink: Winsor & Newton’s Purple. The box made the color look darker, and the picture on the bottle made it look lighter. Fortunately it came out somewhere in between.

I’m not making a point of focusing on where the source leaves come from. Even so, I’ll note that this is the first entry from the set I photographed out at Wyandotte County Lake on Thursday.

Leaf Ghost #24

Get right back up on the horse, right?

The materials I used for this one were practically identical to #23, right down to the colors. I made a few small adjustments, such as using paint cups. But most of the “what have we learned?” here was psychological.

The first lesson was to not paint angry. That’s something I should have remembered from meditation practice in the past. When I’m upset, things like breath control and simple, repetitive actions – normally so soothing for me – just make things worse. So last time around every little thing that went wrong amped my stress level up and up. And that last, fatal smear ... it was ugly.

Further, I found myself rushing through it. My biggest error (other than the smear) was putting down the next layers of masking tape before the last round of paint had time to dry. That resulted in several damage spots that had to be retouched, which of course added to the stress level.

This time around, I make a particular point of taking my time at every step. After each color, I paused long enough to listen to a song or two before moving to the next color. And I stopped for at least 15 minutes before putting down a new set of tape. 

To be sure, I still made mistakes. When I painted row four column two, I forgot to do the small bit of red in the upper right corner. But with my Saturday-with-no-work-to-worry-about mindset, it was less “dammit now the whole thing’s ruined!” and more “no problem, I’ll fix it when I retouch the rough edges at the end.”

The result was not only a more calm experience, but it’s also a milestone in the leaf ghost project. Though I’ve been happy with some previous entries, this is the first one that really turned out how I imagined it when I started working on ghosts earlier this year. I like the color combination. I like the interplay between spaces. I even like the spots where the paint isn’t completely even and the edges aren’t smooth. Neatness appeals to me, but I also appreciate the look and feel of actual paint on real paper. If I wanted everything to be completely smooth and even and easy to adjust, I could stick to digital art. And with these works I’m specifically trying to give myself a break from that stuff, at least for a little while.

For future technical reference, this was Holbein acrylic gouache. The background dark is a mix of forest green and titanium white, and the light is just titanium white. The foreground dark is carmine, and the light is a mix of scarlet and titanium white. The shadow is forest green.

Leaf Ghost #23

Everything was perfect until I started cleaning up while part of the drop shadow was still wet.

Beyond that I don’t have anything to say about this one. I’ll try some of the same techniques again with another one, and I’ll make better notes then.

Leaf Ghost #22

This was my second attempt at a leaf ghost drawn with only one color of ink. I’ve made a few revisions to the concept since my last single-ink attempt (#11), so I was curious to see how it would turn out.

So what have we learned?

Coincidentally, the last time I used only one color of ink, it was also from Noodler’s. This time it was black rather than sequoia green. The green smudged while I was working, so I was curious to see if that was something common to the company’s inks or just that one color. Maybe a little of both, as it turned out. The drop shadow I applied with the C nib smeared a bit, but the rest of it didn’t smudge during the drawing process. Though the eraser crumbs were dark with ink when I got rid of the under sketch at the end, it didn’t smear or otherwise affect the drawing at all.

This is also the first one to suffer serious human error. I was midway through the second pass on row three, column four before I noticed that I shouldn’t have been doing a second pass on that square. Oops.

On the other hand, I’m pleased with how the shades work together. That’s an important moment, because it means I can use this same approach for more monochromatic entries in the future. It will be nice to be able to do quick leaf ghosts without a lot of elaborate set-up at the start or clean-up at the end.

Metal Earth Model – Film Projector

This is my 24th Metal Earth model build. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now.

Of course no amount of practice helps when you need to bend a tab between pieces you’ve already assembled, a gap so small you can’t get any of your tools into it. And as you can probably tell just by looking at it, this is not the model for you if you don’t like bending cylinders.

On the other hand, several folks on the Facebook groups griped about how hard it was to attach the film strip and bend it through its several twists and turns. I didn’t struggle with that part too badly. I also appreciated the decision to not postpone the ever-dreaded join-eight-tabs-at-once step until the end. When the build finishes on a less frustrating note, it’s easier to walk away with a positive impression.

Earworm – Frameless heads on nameless walls

Normally I like to be coy about the name of the song, including it in a comment rather than the post itself. Thus anyone who’d like to try guessing before learning the answer (especially for a hard one like this) won’t have it ruined for them. However, in this case it will be difficult to write about how I created the image without making the song title fairly obvious.

The beautiful paint strokes are a fine detail of part of the horizon from Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” I screen capped it from Google Art’s high resolution version. Then I hand lettered the text in Fresco and tweaked it a little in Photoshop.

The song of course is “Vincent” by Don McLean. Like “American Pie,” it’s a maudlin tune with a lot of effortful symbolism in the lyrics. And this one has the added bonus of romanticizing suicide. But as I’ve gotten older, my youthful dislike of Van Gogh’s work has mellowed into appreciation, which apparently leaves me vulnerable to getting this song stuck in my head.