Ghost Ship in a Bottle

Whilst doing a clear out last year I found some laser cut wooden jar shapes, and as the wooden-object magpie I have become, I kept the shapes for a future art project. Eventually I decided upon a twist on the old ship in a bottle concept. Heavily inspired by Monkey Island as usual, I started with the smallest of the jar shapes and decided to paint a ghost ship in a jar of lava. I really like the concept of things in bottles and jars, it's like capturing a little moment of time and storing it.

I began with some sketches, learning how to draw a pirate ship and trying out some different angles. As opposed to the normal ship in the bottle, I wanted this ship to be more dynamic. Once I'd got comfortable drawing ships I scanned in my sketches and compiled them together to create a simple line drawing version of my design.

Next came the fun process of colouring in! I like to use Photoshop to colour my designs for paintings as it allows me to try lots of different colour schemes quickly. I based this ship design on LeChuck's ghost ship from Monkey Island that lies anchored in a river of lava. The 'Meanwhile' on the scroll is in reference to this. I went with purples and blues, as well as hot orange lava.

After the long design process I could finally start painting. I felt a bit rusty painting and I made a lot of mistakes. I especially had trouble with the yellow paint, I use System 3 acrylic paint which I have always been very happy using, but for some reason I had a difficult time trying to get enough coverage from the yellows. This is a fairly common problem with painting yellows, but this time seemed especially hard - perhaps my set of paints is getting a bit old or maybe I should upgrade to a higher quality. I discovered that painting an underlayer of white paint and then yellow on top helped a lot to avoid streaky paint.

Anyway, after all that trouble with yellow paint, I eventually finished painting. I'd really like to get faster at painting because this small bottle took me a ridiculously long time to complete. The last step is just to decide what to write inside the scroll! Oh, and then varnish.

I'm quite happy with how this piece turned out, I like the bold colours, and I especially like the bottle and cork. I think it's really fun how the piece can stand up as a mix between 2D and 3D. For the next jar, I want to focus on making the ship more "grounded" in the liquid, as it does just kind of sit on top of the lava in this piece. I'm definitely up to paint more ships in jars and try out some different designs.