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.

Leaf Ghost #21

This is only the second leaf ghost to have a name: “Head Shot.” When I was out taking pictures of fallen leaves under the sweetgum tree in the back yard, a new volunteer fell and hit me in the back of the head. Naturally I couldn’t pass up the chance to photograph and paint it.

This is watercolor and ink on paper. The watercolor is Art Creation Yellow and the inks are Winsor & Newton Brilliant Green and Nut Brown (and Black Indian Ink for the shadow).

So what did we learn this time around?

This is the first watercolor / ink combo for which I started with the paint and then added the ink. I drew the usual grid on the paper. Then I applied Friskit masking film and drew the leaf directly onto the film. Cut it out with an Xacto and airbrushed the paint.

That made it impossible to erase the pencil from under the leaf, but it didn’t show much in the end. I also accidentally smudged the black ink with my hand.

 The green and brown color combination is nothing new, but this is the first time I’ve added yellow in an attempt to duplicate (or at least approximate) the colors from the photo of the real thing. Unfortunately, earlier today I watched a vintage ad for Chiquita on Youtube, so now I can’t decide if I think the leaf says “autumn foliage” or “over-ripe banana.”

Leaf Ghost #20

I know that observations such as “I haven’t tried this in years” and “the last time I did this was in college.” But seriously, the last time I made a collage was elementary school. Amy does brilliant collage work that I could never hope to match, but I thought it might be fun to at least try making a leaf ghost collage.

During our ongoing efforts to get rid of the clutter in our house, we found a couple of old road atlases. They’re outdated – not to mention generally useless in the age of map apps on our phones – so they weren’t keepers or donate items. Rather than just throw them out, I thought they might make fun sources of collage materials.

My original plan was to make the background out of streets from the city pages and then do the leaf as a combination of forests and water. But when I started leafing through the first atlas, I noticed that it had two different shades of green for parks and woodlands.

It took awhile to section the usable parts of the maps down into 1.5 inch squares and then cut them all out. For the streets I used a map of downtown San Francisco, supplementing it with Denver to get all the pieces I needed. The greens came from various forests in California and Colorado. My old T square, which had been gathering dust in the basement for years, came in handy for this part of the project.

Once I had the maps cut up, I waited for darkness so I could use my light box to trace the lines from the sketch onto the collage squares. As they had printing on both sides and the sketch itself was faint, this part took some doing.

The next day I trimmed all the leaf pieces down and then pasted everything to the page. I used acrylic medium, my first time working with the stuff. Amy uses it all the time, so she gave me some great advice about how to make it work.

Some light green gouache to fill in the cracks where the pieces didn’t precisely line up. Some black gouache for the drop shadow (I’ll probably use grey watercolor next time so the shadow isn’t quite so opaque). Erase the pencil lines, and done.

This one kinda takes on a political overtone. The dead (yet green) leaf made of wilderness in the middle of a chessboard of urban grids ...  it reminds me of the “I’d rather be a forest than a street” line from Paul Simon’s version of El Condor Pasa.

Coloring book page: Well monster

It’s been awhile since I finished a coloring book page, thanks in no small part to the problems I had with this one. It started out well, but then I got lost in the details. All the little twigs in the background proved especially exasperating, frankly a mistake on the part of the artist from the Call of Cthulhu Coloring Book.

I ended up making some significant alterations from the original, including removing a building from the background. Though I’m still not satisfied with the result, I’m more than ready to move on to something else.