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.