Keeping track of progress on creative projects
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
