Leaf Ghost #163

A foggy day inspires a foggy ghost. Grey background and Copic Ice Ocean / Cool Shadow (one of my favorite color combos) for the leaf.

Leaf Ghost #162

Festive holiday hues courtesy of sumi-e watercolors.

Leaf Ghost #161

At least now we know how “The Cask of Amontillado” ends.

It’s followed by “Alone,” a relatively short poem that fit entirely on the page with plenty of room to spare for the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Unusually, I found a few minutes to work later in the day, so it was already well on to dusk when I finished. I kinda liked working in the dark with only the desk lamp on.

Also at this point I’ve determined that this combination of red and black works best with broader leaves that allow for more of a balance between the colors.

Leaf Ghost #160

After nearly three years of working on the Leaf Ghost series, I’m feeling ready to expand things a bit. With that in mind, this one’s mostly a color study for something bigger next year. Thus the unfinished look.

It’s interesting how the metallics (Valejo Bronze and Silver) look different depending on how the light hits them.

Leaf Ghost #159

It appears to work reasonably well to do the dark squares on a dry surface and dilute the paint with wet-on-wet application for the light squares. The grey and blue work well together, too.

Leaf Ghost #158

This is the second Poe ghost for which I ran out of space with just a sentence or two to go in the story. Weird.

Leaf Ghost #157

When I ran ink tests for Winsor & Newton Nut Brown and Peat Brown, they looked like they’d be different enough to use at equal saturations. But when I actually started drawing, it swiftly became apparent that they were too close together in hue. So I spaced the lines a bit more on the lighter squares.

Fail Point – Driver’s Ed

They don’t all have to be odd moments from my childhood. Sometimes it’s just a bit of humor inspired by sharing the road with a bad driver.

Leaf Ghost #156

Second ghost in a row with a Copic marker running dry. This time it was Yellowish Skin Pink, which must have been an old one because the company has changed the name to something less racist.

You can see it fade out, particularly in row six column four.

Leaf Ghost #155

Winsor & Newton Sunshine Yellow works well in combination with other colors. But it’s difficult to draw with. It’s nearly invisible when applied, which makes it hard to draw narrow parallel lines.

I wonder if it’s supposed to work like that or if I’ve got an old bottle with separated pigments.

Leaf Ghost #154

“The Cask of Amonillado” continues.

Leaf Ghost #153

I love working with Copic markers. They’re easy to use, and they produce such great colors.

However, they’ve got one big drawback: it’s impossible to tell when they’re about to run out of ink. I got most of the way through with Pale Sepia before the marker ran dry. Orange was kind of a substitute but not really.

In fairness, they can be refilled. Sadly, I’ve adopted the economical-yet-dysfunctional practice of not buying refills until I run out unexpectedly in the middle of a project.

Fail Point – Toy Story

In fairness, they got full funerals with eulogies and everything.

Leaf Ghost #152

Watercolor in the ever-popular blue and green combination.

Fail Point – Children’s Lit

A classic without a doubt. But subject to different reactions depending on the reader.

Leaf Ghost #151

Familiar inks, familiar technique. The new trick here is that I did the drop shadow using hatching in the same color as the background squares. The result strikes me as less jarring than using marker or watercolor, more consistent with the drawing as a whole.

Leaf Ghost #150

The last time I was at Scraps, I bought a bag of Speedball A-0 pen nibs. Though I really only need one, it’s nice to have backups (or spares if anyone else wants one).

This is my first time using a broad metal tip since #46. Though the C-0 didn’t work all that well, the A-0 was much better, much more like working with Copics. Winsor & Newton Ultramarine (the darker of the two blues) was a bit thick for the nib, but the Blue, Orange and Sunshine Yellow flowed smoothly. 

To be sure, mistakes were made. I got out of sync with the pattern and used the wrong ink on two of the upper left squares. Naturally I was using the darker color at the time, so I couldn’t fix it by going over it with the correct color. Also some smearing around spots where the ink puddled, which just means I need to let everything dry before moving on to the next color.

As this turned out to be an experimental piece, I decided to try a Copic C7 Cool Grey marker for the drop shadow. The combination of alcohol-based ink on water-based ink produced some odd spotting, so I probably wouldn’t try that again unless I specifically wanted the effect.

Still, it’s nice to get such vivid colors with minimal cleanup.

Leaf Ghost # 149

Back to Poe, finishing “The Raven” and moving on to “The Cask of Amontillado.”

One thing I noticed while working on the poem was that it seemed awkward when quotation marks butted up against each other. That isn’t a problem with normal text layout, but with the line breaks removed they looked odd.

With that in mind, I’ve switched to the British style of single marks. It’s one more thing I need to remember to do while I’m working, but it looks a little better in this context.

Leaf Ghost #148

Having tried this ink combination on tan paper, grey seemed like a natural follow-up. Odd how it looks almost like pencil here.

Leaf Ghost #147

One more before classes get underway. Same inks as I’ve been using for several recent ghosts, this time on brown paper.

Leaf Ghost #146

Back to Copic markers for the first time in awhile. I intended the dark blue to be a little lighter, but the pen I started with was out of ink.

Leaf Ghost #145

Poe ghost with the new ink. “Masque of the Red Death” done, and moved on to “The Raven.”

Leaf Ghost #144

Same inks as last time, with the tech pens I’ve been using for the Poe ghosts. So far the flow has been considerably better with the fancy new ink.

Also spilled some when I was loading one of the pens. Turns out the black ink is purple when diluted.

Leaf Ghost #143

I’ve been experiencing some frustration with the ink I’ve been using for the Poe ghosts. It tends to flow unevenly out of the tech pens I’m using, requiring me to get them going on a piece of scratch paper after setting them down for just a minute or two.

In pursuit of something a little easier to work with, I thought I would try some fancier ink specifically for fountain pens. This initial test was done with dip pen, just so I could see how easy it is to draw with when there’s no worry about the pen getting clogged.

I’m impressed. The black is Kasakiribane and the dark red is Yodaki, both from Shikiori. And they’re both instantly water soluble, which bodes well for their flow potential. When rinsed, the black turns purple.

Even more fun than that, the red seemed to blend a bit with the black that was already on the page, turning it brown in spots. The result was a little like drawing with drying blood, which is an excellent effect for the whole Poe thing.

You kinda have to see this one in person to really pick up what the colors are doing.

Leaf Ghost #142

OMG ran out of space with less than three sentences left in the story!

Leaf Ghost #141

This one combined dry paper for the dark squares with wet-on-wet for the lighter spots. I love the vivid colors of the sumi-e paint set.

I also enjoyed listening to a trio arrangement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony while I painted. Nicely relaxing.

Fail Point – Wearing Glasses

This year I’ve started work on a sequential art project called “Fail Points.” The project takes its name from the engineering term for any point in a process where things can break down, often causing the entire system to stop working.

As the name implies, entries will focus on some of the less successful moments in my life. For the time being, I’m keeping the multi-page stories to myself. But I’m also planning a set of four-panel minis, this being the first.

Leaf Ghost #140

Poe, page two.

I think this particular variation on the leaf ghost theme might look right at home on the walls of the Glore Museum. But perhaps that’s part of the charm.

Leaf Ghost #139

My idea of an ideal summer, all captured in a single photo.

After a rough May, I’m finally settling back into a place of comfort with some creative work. I actually did the pencil sketch for this ghost more than a month ago and then couldn’t find the time or energy to actually paint it. 

I even briefly changed the number, assuming that I’d do some ghosts when we were on vacation in late May, but between the rain and the cicadas there wasn’t really a lot of opportunity to spread out on the picnic table and paint.

The greens have too much water in them, which produced an uneven surface effect that I thought looked leafy.

Leaf Ghost #138

Wait, didn’t I recently do one just like this using this same story? Well, yes and no.

Ghost #133 was the same style and even the same tale. I was pleased enough with the result that I thought it might be fun to create a whole sketchbook with nothing but leaf ghosts made out of Poe stories. I enjoy creating them, and actually being able to continue on to the end of the story appeals to me.

So this is page one of what I’m hoping will be a more extensive set.

Ear Worm – In Your Head

This wasn’t originally designed to be an ear worm. It’s an illustration I created for a sequential art project I’m working on. But I did sneak some song lyrics into it (and the song has been stuck in my head recently).

Leaf Ghost #137

Back to Copics. These are the same colors as Leaf Ghost #48 only reversed. And the shadow is Cool Grey 5.

Leaf Ghost #136

Same pens, same inks, this time on tan paper. Drop shadow done entirely with hatching using the narrower tip.

Leaf Ghost #135

Same inks and pens as #133, only with the colors reversed.

The experiment here was to do the drop shadow with lines while the work was in progress rather than using markers or watercolors at the end. Seemed to work. Would do again.

Leaf Ghost #134

I recently saw an exhibit at the Nelson about watercolor technique. I wish they’d do more of this sort of thing, as I found it interesting and inspirational. I was particularly fond of "Italian Hills" by Arthur Bowen Davies, so I thought I’d try applying his technique to a leaf ghost.

Ghost geometry produces a much different look and feel from a landscape, but it was still a fun experiment. This is also my first time working in mixed media with both watercolor (background) and gouache (foreground).

Leaf Ghost #133

So lots of firsts here.

The main one is the use of text as the main graphic element. Appropriately enough, the story is Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” While working, I referred to the entry in It Takes Every Word, a lit anthology (complete with writing prompts) I put together and illustrated several years ago.

I used Winsor & Newton Deep Red and Black India loaded into Rapidograph tech pens (0.35 and 0.7 mm, one for each color for a total of four pens). I’ve used line width variation before, and I also used tech pens recently. But this is my first time combining colors and widths exactly this way.

Of course with the image also being a story, the only way to do it was to go line by line, copying the text and switching pens each time the hue or brightness changed. More than once I found myself wishing I was working with something less temperamental than tech pens.

This is also my first time working with pens on illustration board. I guess I could have used a sketchbook, but somehow I sensed that I might want this one to be more of a stand-alone.

One more first: I’d never used the same pen for the art and the caption at the bottom.

Leaf Ghost #132

Fans of the leaf ghost series may recognize this color combination from #105. However, this is Koh-I-Noor Scarlet rather than Winsor & Newton Deep Red.

So this ghost is an ink test, both to see whether the color was good and also whether cleanup would be easy. Yes and no.

The color is a darker red that looks a little like dried blood, which will make it perfect for an upcoming ghost. Unfortunately it was a colossal pain to clean off the dip pen nib. Neither water nor alcohol completely removed it, so I had to resort to paint thinner. And that makes it unusable for the future project I have in mind, because I’ll use tech pens for that and they’re hard enough to clean even when the ink isn’t stubborn.

But that’s okay. The W&N ink looks pretty much the same, and it dissolves easily with water.