Leaf Ghost #251

 

As I may already have admitted elsewhere, once upon a time I was a creepy little kid. Among my unsavory fascinations were pathology textbooks (in my defense, I genuinely wanted to be a forensic pathologist like Quincy ME on TV). Thus when I accidentally came up with a color combination that reminded me of microscope slides of infected tissue (see Leaf Ghost #233) I knew it was a theme I wanted to explore further.

This is the look I’ve been after. The background is two intensities of Rose Madder Deep from the Kuretake Gansai watercolor set. The foreground is acrylics: Alizarin Crimson Hue with high flow medium, lighter squares the same only with a small bit of Titanium White. 

One of the great blessings of using acrylics for the leaf is that I don’t have to be as precise with the wet-on-wet background. It’s okay if the paint bleeds into the leaf part, because the opaque acrylic will cover it. Even when it’s somewhat unevenly applied – another effect I enjoy in this context – it still covers the background completely.

Normally I prefer to lighten reds with either umber or yellow rather than white, which tends to turn the paint mauve or pink. But in this case it fit nicely with the overall color scheme. 

Leaf Ghost #250

Four out of the five markers I used for this one were freshly refilled. That’s Copic Y18 Lightning Yellow, Y13 Lemon Yellow, BG13 Aqua and the C5 Cool Grey #5 shadow. Only the darker foreground – BG49 Duck Blue – wasn’t a refill.

It shows in the drawing as less distinct marker lines, especially in the lighter yellow squares. And it strongly bled through the paper.

 

Leaf Ghost #249

Today’s ghost technique was something I wasn’t at all sure would work. But JetPens assured me it was a thing, and I trust them.

Back during Ghost Week I used watercolor paint with a dip pen, and it worked as well as ink. But the paint back in June was from a tube, mixed with water in a small cup. So dipping the nib into it was pretty much the same as using ink.

As ghost fans already know, lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with gansai watercolors from pans. They’re beautiful, but there isn’t really a convenient way to dip a nib into a shallow pan. That’s where JetPens’ helpful suggestion entered the picture: use a brush to load paint onto the nib.

Assuming I would need to have a flat space on my left for the paint, I had to wait until the last model cleared the table in my art space. However, once I was underway I found that the pen needed reloading infrequently enough that it wasn’t a huge interruption to switch hands while refilling. So I could keep the paint to my right, a lucky thing because the portable easel I had on the table was being difficult.

The previous watercolor pen combo used two colors at two different line widths. This time I kept all the line widths narrow but used four colors (Ultramarine and Ultramarine Pale in back, Sap Green Deep and Sap Green in front). The result was exactly the combination I like: lighter colors with distinct differences in the background, darker colors with lower contrast for the leaf.

Metal Earth Model – British Mark IV Tank

Like the Monitor half of the previous kit, this one was a straightforward build without an excessive number of tricky steps. Were there super tiny pieces? Did I end up looking for some of them on the floor? Yes, of course. But overall this was a fun build.

Added bonus: World War One is one of my special interests, so I found this kit fascinating not just as something to build but also as something I’d read about. Kinda fun to have this historical reference perched on the bookshelf above my desk. 

Metal Earth Models - Monitor and Merrimack

 

I can practically hear the Civil War nerds griping that the ship on the left is actually the CSS Virginia, but I opted to go with the more widely known name because it’s the one Metal Earth used for the name of the two-boat kit.

Of the two, the Monitor was considerably easier to build. The parts in general fit better together, and it required four pages of instructions rather than its partner’s 12. Plus the Monitor was a childhood favorite of mine.

That said, both models had a lot of tiny parts, some of which inevitably hit the floor. So pretty typical Metal Earth experiences.

Leaf Ghost #248

For a ghost that was mostly intended as experimental, I ended up really liking the combination of colors and techniques.

The background is a wet-on-wet blend of Kuretake Gansai watercolor Cadmium Red and Cadmium Yellow. Usually when I do this particular trick, the combination is a color straight out of the pan for the dark squares and watered down for the light squares. The red proved to be somewhat temperamental, but the orange went on more smoothly.

The leaf is the most complex acrylic blend I’ve tried so far. The light squares are a combination of Chromium Oxide Green, Chromium Cerulean Blue, Titanium White and high flow medium. The dark squares are the same mix with three dabs of Bone Black added. I should probably have stopped at two. I’m finding that I get the best illusion of transparency from colors that are just different enough to tell them apart without changing shade or hue beyond that.

The leaf colors are also an experiment for another project, where they’ll probably show up a little lighter and with more medium. 

Leaf Ghost #247

The last thing I’d ever want to do is drag petty politics into the leaf ghost project. And yet given the current thread of the Poe series, I can’t help but note that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is at this point either a.) hospitalized for a month after a minor fall, b.) already dead but being lied about due to some chicanery with the upcoming election, or c.) merely dead but not yet really most sincerely dead thanks to extraordinary medical intervention.

In any event, M. Valdemar has now passed away.

Or has he? 

Metal Earth Model – Orthanc

I started work on this model literally years ago. Inspired by the non-Metal-Earth kit I recently finished, I thought I’d give this one another try. Though I’m a bit out of practice, it came back to me fairly quickly. 

One thing I noted was that with work like this it actually helped to not listen to music while I was putting it together. Back when I first started, I tried playing soundtracks from the Lord of the Rings movies. I swiftly figured out that most of it was the same three or four themes adapted over and over again for hours on end. When I resumed, I tried some classical favorites. But honestly just quiet worked as well if not better.

Barad Dur probably won’t be the next model I build, but I hope to get to it sooner rather than later. I need it to balance out the space on my bookshelf across from where this one now resides. 

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.