The story behind my little ghost illustrations~

Hello~! 💖💖

The other day, while looking through my old sketchbooks to show you some scans, I found my old ghost drawings, and then I remembered that I used to draw them a lot.

That made me think: where did I find the original idea that started it all? I think it’s kind of interesting to explain.

It all started with this book: The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night by Jen Campbell. I followed her on YT and really liked the premise of this short story collection. But one of them really stuck with me. For some reason, it was very vivid in my mind, even though it’s only 5 pages long. It’s called Little Deaths.

"Our town is full of ghosts.
We try to catch them during break. They struggle against our grip, shapeshifting. We shove them into wine bottles and jam jars, fish bowls and snow globes."

So I started drawing them. I really loved the concept of playful and colorful little ghosts that eat electricity~ 💡✨

This is my first colored drawing using Copics (2017). I had only 5 colors at the time and no idea how to use them, so I tried my best!

Back then, my color choices felt very random since I had to work with such limited palettes, but I think I managed to make it look pretty good. Here I learned that things don’t always need to be painted with their proper color and that I could try weird combinations.

Over time I ended up changing the idea, making the ghosts into little blobs of hot coffee smoke, some kind of jelly that floated everywhere, or that got stuck in mugs…

As you can see, the design also changed along with my drawing style, which became more defined and a lot chubbier~ The “tail” wasn’t so stretched out anymore, but rounder and bubblier.

I used a colored mechanical pencil with pink and orange leads. That’s why the drawings look so clean, unlike my current ones with regular colored pencils. It's not that color pencils are a bad choice or anything, it's just a style~

Once I switched from my Midori MD sketchbook to these dotted ones, my style changed a bit, since I allowed myself to be less clean with the shapes.

Now my style feels messier, but I really like how you can see the drawing evolve through the faint lines of the first draft, building on top of each other.

Hope you like it! I think you can really see the progress in my drawing style. While looking through the notebooks I really missed using my Midoris and mechanical pencils. I haven’t drawn that sleek in a long time, and I kind of want to try it again!!

Have a lovely day!💖