Creating the Phantom Bride

by Richard Ong

Here is the process by which the “Phantom Bride” artwork was born:

I initially pencil-sketched all the artifacts on a 9-inch x 12-inch Canson Montval Acrylic paper (185-lb grain). You can replicate the first bride using both tracing and transfer paper to create her two phantom companions overlapping each other.

Next, I secured the canvas paper on a drawing board using a lot of Scotch tape. Unless you are using an actual canvas board, wet acrylic paint will tend to curl up the corners of even the highest grain paper, so it’s best that you secure it to a board before dipping your brush on a glob of paint.

For this project, I used a combination of both acrylic ink (in a bottle) and acrylic paint from a tube. Seasoned acrylic painters will know that acrylic ink has a thinner spread, but ideal for creating an undercoat to lay out all the major colours of the painting. Acrylic ink can also be applied a lot easily using a thin brush.

Acrylic ink was also exclusively used to smoothly render the phantom duplicates of the bride. Since the canvas is already white, I left several areas within the ghostly forms unpainted to give the illusion of a mist-like transparency. It is also very important to use the same background colour for outlining the shape of her ghostly sisters and leave just enough white in between.

I used the heavier texture of acrylic paint from a tube to create a second layer on the bride’s gown, parts of the curtain, the balcony and the gold trimmings of the chandelier. The candles on the chandelier are lemon yellow. Titanium white was lightly used to create texture on the gold paint. I also used thicker gold paint on many parts of the chandelier in order to give it a more ornate look.

An easy way to create the folds and designs on the bride’s gown is to vary the amount of paint on the tip of your brush. Thicker lemon yellow paint was used to create the illusion of texture.

Finally, the dried canvas was photographed using an iPhone camera under an incandescent yellow light to bring out the intensity of the yellow, gold and red hues. This type of “scanning” is important especially if you plan to use some photo-editing tools to enhance the image. Any kind of reflected light information (whether it’s natural or artificially generated) becomes raw material to your photo-editing applications to manipulate.

In the case of the “Phantom Bride,” I used Photoshop to increase the contrast of the image until the sky became dark, the chandelier brightened and the yellow gown’s colour intensity increased (partly due to the reflected light during the photo op). As all seasoned photographers will tell you, the light creates the mood that you want. If it works on a live model, why not on your painting?