Leaf Ghost #246

Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate. I briefly considered increasing the ghost pace during the last week or so to make it to #250 for this one. But after the excitement of Ghost Week last month, I opted against.

This is the first time in awhile that I’ve done one with radically different background colors. That’s Cadmium Red Medium and Titanium White, both with a little Raw Sienna mixed in for a bit of an antique look. The leaf is Ultramarine Blue and Cerulean Blue Chromium right out of the tube.

I mixed in airbrush thinner to get the paint to distribute more evenly, and I also did two passes on all the squares (except the off white ones) to make the brush strokes harder to see. Still fairly visible on the light blue spots, though even those squares look more even if you’re looking at the actual thing rather than this photo.

The leaf looks a little like a flag and a face, giving a strong sense of pareidolia. 

Model - Plutonium Bomb Core

It’s been quite awhile (literally years) since I’ve built a model. But a friend bought kits of the central components (plutonium core and explosive lens sphere) of a nuclear bomb. 

I’m out of practice, and the glue we started working with was well past its prime. The result was a bit rough. Thankfully it’s a little easier to hide problems on a sphere that can be oriented so the gaps don’t show.

 

Leaf Ghost #245

I was down to two Kuretake colors I hadn’t swatched yet, and I knew I wanted to use at least one of them for today’s ghost. I’m in love with Cobalt Violet, though Imperial Violet also looks like it has a lot of potential.

The big experiment this time around was on the background. The lighter squares were a single application of watered-down Purple, and the darker squares were two passes with the same mix. I have a vague ambition to start doing more monochromatic watercolor work, and this technique will be crucial to making that work.

Leaf Ghost #244

One of the emerging trends in leaf ghosts is the use of more subtle distinctions between foreground and background. For example, most recently I used different saturation levels of the same hue. This is the opposite: different hues at similar intensities. The leaf is my beloved cool shadow / ice ocean combo, and the background is levels 1 and 3 of the cool grey range.

C3 started running low on ink around midway through. Though I refilled it, apparently I should have either waited for the ink to seep into the tip or applied some ink directly to the tip. On the one hand, not exactly the look I was going for. On the other hand, as the darker grey fades from top to bottom, it gets closer to the lighter grey until there isn’t much of a contrast at all. 

Leaf Ghost #243

This starts with background inspiration from #233. Though the background there was Crimson Lake from my Koi portable set, I thought it looked a lot like Rose Madder from the Kuretake set. So that’s where I began today. And then for the foreground I used Rose Madder Deep, making this my first experiment with using two different paints of the same general hue. Also kinda interesting how neither of them in their pans look much like the colors they become on the paper.

For awhile when I was a kid I wanted to be a forensic pathologist when I grew up. This was due in part to the popularity of Quincy M.E. and probably also due in part to me being a morbid little tween. I think the fascination still lingers in the back of my mind, as this color combination suggests to me a microscope slide of a tissue sample.

Leaf Ghost #242

The Copic-specific sketchbook I started working on three years ago is now full. As the cover indicates, this is the third sketchbook I’ve filled with leaf ghosts. Though there was nothing wrong with this paper, there also wasn’t anything remarkable about it. So I’ll probably resume doing Copic ghosts in the main sketchbook.

To bookend things, I went back to the colors I used for #77. Well, more or less. YG21 had run dry. But the rest of them worked nicely, and C3 grey stepped in to supply the subtle shadow. 

Leaf Ghost #241

Ghost Week concludes with a trickier project: airbrushing with tube acrylics.

Predictably, the main challenge was to find a way to thin the paint so it wouldn’t clog the brush. For the background hues (raw and burnt sienna) I used a thinner designed specifically for airbrushes. The results weren’t perfect, but they at least suggested possibilities. 

Insert “why can’t anyone cook sienna just right?” joke here. 

I mixed water into burnt umber for the foreground, and the paint turned patchy (as it did yesterday when I tried the same thing with traditional brushes). Here it was kind of a fun effect, though.

One of the big advantages to working with acrylics is that they’re opaque and will cover the layers beneath them. So I was able to paint the entire frame with the lighter background color and then mask for a chessboard of the darker background color on top of it.

This also allowed me to do all of the pencil sketching on the masking film rather than drawing lines on the board itself.

Leaf Ghost #240

A new medium this time: tube acrylics.

Recently I’ve been doing some reading about acrylics, and I decided to get a set of colors recommended by one of the books I read. I even improvised a set of hooks for them on a bookshelf in my art space.

The texture will take some getting used to. I’ve used liquid acrylics several times in the past, but the thicker stuff mixes differently and goes onto the paper much differently. I also learned that trying to thin it with water doesn’t work very well. So clearly I have some more learning to do.

On the other hand, I like the color combination. This does a nice job of creating the illusion of transparency that’s important to the whole leaf ghost thing.

Leaf Ghost #239

Here’s a first: watercolor paint applied with a dip pen. The drawing technique is the same as #181, here using paint rather than ink. I was surprised at how little difference there was between the two media. It’s an encouraging step, as it’s easier to blend colors with paint than it is with ink.

I also notice that on the thicker lines the paint tended to pool a bit at the bottom of each stroke (toward the top once the paper is rotated 90 degrees from how I drew it to what it’s supposed to look like).  

Leaf Ghost #238

Valdemar continues.

I find the leaf particularly hard to see in this one, even when face to face with the original rather than trying to view it via this photo. It’s a shorter, wider leaf with irregular edges, two factors that work against visibility in the Poe series. 

Leaf Ghost #237

Back to the Kuretake Gansai watercolors for a combination of wet-on-wet background and full-strength-and-diluted foreground. The colors are 57 Turquoise Green Deep and 67 Indigo.

I’ve now swatched all but two of the colors in the 48-color set. 

Leaf Ghost #236

The color scheme from #234 reproduced with Copic markers.

My ink refills arrived last week, so now I’m all set for my full range of cool grey markers. 

Leaf Ghost #235

Let Ghost Week 2026 commence!

I thought I’d get things underway with something simple (watercolor) that I hadn’t done in awhile (grey paper). 

If I’d given it any thought, it might have occurred to me that the white in particular would be a problem. Being watercolor – and white as well – it faded to near total transparency on the absorbent grey paper. It took multiple coats to make it visible at all, especially on the squares that needed to actually look white. Thus this ended up taking longer than I expected.

The foreground (Kuretake gold and blue gold) on the other hand went on relatively easily. I typically don’t use a lot of metallics, but I have something in mind for these in another project.

Leaf Ghost #234

There’s a lot going on with this one.

For starters, it’s the first bi-state leaf ghost. I did the under sketch at home in Kansas City. Then I painted the background on vacation just north of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Then I painted the foreground back home in Kansas.

Part of the decision was driven by the weather. Frequent rain kept me off the deck for most of the trip, so I only ended up with time enough for the background. But more than the timing, I felt strongly that the leaf needed to be done in gouache (which of course I didn’t have with me).

The watercolor part was the same as the last one, only with 004 Ivory Black. The result reminded me of Stephen Gammell’s illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It’s a look I’ve been trying to master digitally for awhile now, so it was fun to see it crop up more or less by accident in a physical medium.

The effect also reminded me of smoke, so much so that I figured the leaf pretty much had to be fire colors. I also wanted it to be solid. Hence the gouache.

Speaking of which, this was my first time blending analogous colors. Both the dark and light squares of the foreground began with Holbein 035 Orange. But then I blended in 003 Scarlet for the dark sections and 033 Deep Yellow for the light sections.

Which also makes this my first foray into a mixed media piece using watercolor and gouache.

And technique-wise, this is also my first time doing a lift on dry watercolor. The little bit of background in row three column four bled in from the dark paint above it. So I lifted out a little of the color to bring back the needed contrast.

The result is almost narrative. Is it a top-down view of a flame floating in a cloud of smoke? Or perhaps a burning ember with smoke behind it? I’m generally not trying for storytelling with the whole leaf ghost thing, but I don’t mind it creeping in here and there. 

And finally, the ghost number is sequential digits. We won’t have that again for another 111 entries. 

Leaf Ghost #233

Vacation time! This ghost finds me painting on the deck outside the caboose we stay at every May.

Though I like the leaf colors, the real star of the show is the background. I painted this using my portable Koi watercolors set. The background is painted wet on wet using 022 Crimson Lake at full strength and considerably watered down (you can see the watery mix in the upper right corner of the tray). The result is eerily biological, like a microscope slide of organ tissue or something like that.

Also during the trip I finished swatching all the colors in the Koi set. You can see the tiny sketchbook I used for swatching on the table in the upper left.

Leaf Ghost #232

New kitten making up her mind about whether the leaf ghost creation process meets with her approval. The jury may still be out. 

The tale of M. Valdemar’s peculiar passing continues.

The leaf this time had a mouth-like gap on the left side, and I was curious to see how well it would show up. It’s there if you look carefully. 

 

Leaf Ghost #231

The purple and yellow complements continue. The background purples are the same as #207, but the leaf this time is Y18 Lightning Yellow and Y13 Lemon Yellow (which I nearly ran out of before I could finish).

Leaf Ghost #230

Same techniques as #227. Same set of Gansai watercolors, using Purple and Lilac for the background and Aureolin and Lemon Yellow for the leaf. The paper is 140 lb cold press watercolor paper, so rougher but less subject to warping than the mixed media paper I used the last time the background was wet on wet.

Leaf Ghost #229

Hop-Frog at last comes to its fiery end, neatly at the end of the sixth line of the sixth row.

The poem between stories this time is A Dream Within a Dream, which arguably could serve as an epigraph for the entire Leaf Ghost series.

And then at the very bottom of the page we dig into The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

The page this time suffered some slight damage when a small splash of water from another project fell on the paper right around row five column five. I hadn’t gotten that far with the ink yet, and (despite what the shadows are doing in this photo) the warping was barely visible. However, it made me glad that this particular sketchbook is exclusively for pen and ink. Clearly this wouldn’t have taken watercolors at all well.

Leaf Ghost #228

Inspired by yesterday’s ghost, today I switched to Copic swimming pool colors. The blue-green background colors (BG49 Duck Blue and BG15 Aqua) are both in the range between my frequent flyers (Cool Shadow and Ice Ocean).

The leaf is G09 Veronese Green and G03 Meadow Green. As the look here vaguely suggests a leaf floating in a pool, I left off the drop shadow. 

Leaf Ghost #227

I tried some new stuff with this one. The background is wet-on-wet, with water added with a brush one row at a time. The substrate is mixed media paper, which doesn’t absorb much of the water. That made it perfect for the effect I was after here. One of the sketchbooks I experimented with yesterday drank the water so quickly that it was practically a dry surface before I could even get any paint on it.

Though this paper leaves plenty of water on the surface, it does tend to buckle a bit. The surface turns into ridges and valleys, and the valleys become lakes. This produces all kinds of fascinating effects, such as what happened in row three, column one.

The background colors are Kuretake Gansai Tambi Viridian and Malechite. Greens in this general range seem like “swimming pool” colors to me, which makes them apt for the watery look. They’re also in the same hue family as the cover of the Leuchtturm1917 sketchbook I impulse bought at May Day last week, which may be too fancy for me to ever actually draw in.

After the paper dried, I used Cobalt Blue and Cerulean Blue for the leaf. 

Leaf Ghost #226

This one might well set a record for the longest time between under-sketch and final drawing. I did the set-up digital and pencil stuff shortly after I finished the last one, but then I got caught up with work and didn’t get back to start the ink until yesterday.

Hop-Frog has the king right where he wants him, but he hasn’t put the final twist into motion yet. 

Leaf Ghost #225

I don’t know why the Copic ghosts photograph with a pinkish tint every once in awhile. Perhaps it has something to do with the paper.

Speaking of which, I’ve had Copics in high rotation (approximately one out of every three) because I’ve been doing them in their own sketchbook and the book’s nearly done. I’ll definitely finish it sometime this year, possibly even before the start of the summer.

The inks are the earth tones from #215, and the background is my beloved cool shadow / ice ocean combo.

Leaf Ghost #224

In the entry for #221 I mentioned that I’d started work with a new set of watercolors. My goal is to use all of the colors at least once before repeating any of them. I’ve already failed, as I reused Yellow Ochre for the shadow this time around.

 The other colors are Rose Beige, Natural Beige, Sap Green Deep and Sap Green Light.

So if the coming weeks and months feature a large number of watercolor ghosts, that’s why.

 

Leaf Ghost #223

Hop-Frog continues. I think the king may have pushed his jester just a bit too far.

 Over the holidays I did some upgrading in my studio space at home. One of the changes was a fancy new iPad stand that holds the tablet up away from the table. It’s just as easy to read there, and it frees up some space.

The other big addition for this one is a video showing how it was created. If you were ever curious about what goes into leaf ghosts in general and the Poe series in particular, this shows a quick step-by-step. 

Leaf Ghost #222

 

Perhaps it’s auspicious that #222 was created on 1/11.

Same colors as #218 only with foreground and background reversed.

Leaf Ghost #221

One of the rules of leaf ghosts is that the model and the painting (or drawing) are directly related only by the outline of the leaf. The art is never an attempt to accurately recreate the subject.

 However, every once in awhile the two end up at least somewhat related. I’ve noticed that pictures of wet leaves tend to become watercolors. And with this ghost I thought it might be fun if the background at least vaguely suggested bricks (again without making any effort to duplicate the colors from the photo).

This also supplied a good excuse to try out my new set of Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors. Doubtless a topic I’ll explore in greater detail in some future post.

 

Leaf Ghost #220

First ghost of the new year. The saga of Hop-Frog continues.