Leaf Ghost #94

Still in a grey mood, and falling back on the Copics for an easy win.

My original intent was to use Cool Greys 3 and 7 for the leaf, but C7 had run dry. So I switched to C5 and C9, with a black drop shadow. The blues are B05 Process and B14 Light.

Leaf Ghost #93

Anybody want a free bottle of Winsor & Newton white ink?

It’s been awhile (January maybe?) since I was genuinely displeased with a leaf ghost result. But this one seriously didn't work.

The black went on just fine with the B-5 nib, but the white ink was too thick. It clogged the nib, making it apparent in just a few short lines that it wasn't going to work.

So I decided to try finishing the drawing with a brush instead. I guess it's better than not finishing at all, but the brush was ill-suited for cross hatching. Definitely not doing this again.

Leaf Ghost #92

Back to wet-on-wet watercolors. The new thing here is that I used only dark blue and dark green. I got the lighter shades by diluting the colors rather than applying them directly to the wet paper.

My leaf ghost goal for the year was to average one per week. I hadn’t expected to make it to the 52d before the end of June.

Leaf Ghost #91

Ever since last week I’ve been excited about reversing the colors on a grey paper ghost. Though I’m pleased with the result, I think I like the white leaf a little better. More ghostly that way.

The other experiment this time around is spreading the drawing out to two sessions on two different days. That’s not a huge concern over the summer, but during the school year it will likely make it easier to fit cross-hatched ghosts into my schedule.

Metal Earth Model – Willys Overland

This one took awhile. It’s from the Premium series, promising “bigger, more details, more fun.” To which they could easily have added “more aggravation.” For the most part the extra level of detail was good, but at several points the model featured elements that bordered on design flaws.

In particular, a lot of the slots were in unnecessarily difficult spots. Some were placed on folds, which made it hard to fit the pins in. And others were placed less than a millimeter from another slot, and putting the pin in the wrong one caused no end of trouble. The entire build required hypervigilance to detail, even more so than an average Metal Earth model. I managed to catch myself before I made quite a few mistakes, and even so I messed up in three or four spots.

Definitely not one for beginners. This was #30 for me.

And it’s a continuation of my streak of building models of places where I’ve been. I admit I’ve never driven an actual Willys, but I’ve seen them in museums several times. And I used to drive a Jeep Wrangler, which is about as close as you can come without investing in a museum piece.

Leaf Ghost #90

Most of the left half of this leaf was missing, but I thought that made it an interesting shape.

And so concludes Ghost Week 2023. Though it took up a lot of time and energy for the last seven days, overall I’m pleased with the results.

Leaf Ghost #89

It’s been awhile since I did a collage leaf ghost. They’re fun to put together, and they look good. But so much work! I was at this one for most of the day, taking break every once in awhile.

In addition to the usual prep sketch, I numbered the squares so I could figure out how many of each type I would need to find in the old atlas I used as my source. For the leaf I decided to use the same forest land colors I used last time.

But for the background I went in a new direction. Half of the squares are from a Manhattan street map, and the other half are from a state map of northeastern New York. Cutting all those 1.5-inch squares out of specific parts of specific maps took some doing.

To make them more visually distinct from each other, I dipped each piece in water and then used wet-on-wet watercolors to paint them blue before sticking them down with matte medium. The foreground didn’t need paint, so it went on more quickly.

The result unintentionally became a comment on climate change and rising sea levels, with the cities submerged under blue and the wild mountains becoming an island. Funny then that some of the leaf squares are from the San Gabriel Mountains part of a map of Los Angeles. And one of the darker national park squares includes “devastated area” and a location identified as “Bumpass Hell.”

Leaf Ghost #88

Airbrush leaf ghosts take forever. All that masking! Still, it’s hard to argue with the results.

Same general color scheme as Leaf Ghost #45. Valejo acrylics: Beige Red and Basic Skin Tone (so still not quite past racism in model color names) for the background. Burnt Red and Flat Red for the leaf. Black for the shadow, which mixed up strangely thick and spattered a bit out of the brush.

Leaf Ghost #87

One of my fondest memories of art school was doing subtractive charcoal sketching in Drawing 1. We started by covering white drawing paper with an even coat of medium grey vine charcoal. Then we made our drawings by erasing the light areas of the subject rather than drawing in the dark areas. Once some dark charcoal was added for the shadows and some white conte crayon drawn on for the highlights, the result was sfumato, a smoky blend of shades first made popular during the Renaissance.

On my last visit to an art supply store, I picked up a sketchbook of grey paper. I had some white ink from a set I bought awhile back, and I thought it would be fun to start with a mid-toned backdrop and work out into darks and lights from the middle rather than starting with light and adding color and darkness.

I’m pleased with the result. It was tricky to cross-hatch the lighter squares of the leaf rather than the darker squares (adding white ink making them lighter than the single-hatched darker parts). But otherwise this was a familiar process creating an unfamiliar result. Of all the ghosts so far, this is in many ways the most ghostly.

Notes on materials: the inks are Winsor & Newton White and Black Indian Ink. Because my usual 2H pencil was hard to see on the grey paper, I did the undersketch using a 4B.

The next time I return to this paper and these inks, I think I’ll switch and see how well the white works in the background.

Leaf Ghost #86

Having some fun with gouache this afternoon. I thought it might be fun to have the background colors nearly match but use two different hues for the leaf. It’s an interesting effect.

Holbein Orange and Deep Yellow foreground, Cerulean Blue and Cobalt Blue background, Navy Blue shadow.

Leaf Ghost #85

A new nib this morning. This is the Speedball B-5, the tip of which is a small circle rather than a fine point. The result is wider lines.

I had no idea how this would turn out, but I definitely like the darker, more saturated colors. The Winsor and Newton Blue tended to pool up at the end of each stroke. The Orange didn’t pool as badly, but it was pickier about the pen being at the perfect angle to press the tip flat against the paper. The drop shadow is Ultramarine brushed on, which went as well as it typically does.

For comparison, this ghost is the same orange with a narrower tip, and this ghost is the same blue only narrower. Note that the colors here may be “popping” a bit more because they’re direct complements.

I don’t know if this will become my nib of choice for cross-hatched leaf ghosts, but I will definitely return to it in the future.

Leaf Ghost #84

Having met with reasonable success working outside on vacation, I thought I’d give the back deck at home a try. It worked remarkably well until the sun found a break between the tree branches. After that I just couldn’t find an angle where the light wasn’t either in my eyes or on the paper. And unlike working with dip pens, wet-on-wet watercolors required me to be able to clearly see small variations in color.

So inside I went to finish it up. This was also my first time working with the watercolor set I made by squeezing Art Creations paints from their tubes into an empty tray. I’m pleased with the result.

Leaf Ghost #83

Back home, and back to less elaborate set-ups.

Though I have a good range of Copic markers, most of the reds look similar to each other. I like it when the colors don’t have as much contrast, but some of these took me by surprise even when I tested the inks before I started drawing.

In particular, my “embrace the analog” approach was put to the test when the Prawn marker started out much darker than expected. You can see it lighten from the start in the top row on down the page to the bottom.

I also note that the paper in the Copic sketchbook is somewhat inconsistent. The first page was super thin and had a coated feel to it. But the last one and this one were thicker, more of a Bristol feel to them, and consequently less bleed-through.

Still, after green and blue monochromes, this one seemed like the obvious next choice for a color scheme.