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.