Gosh Gouache

A thought occurred to me yesterday while watching PaperTigress do a lovely Gouache landscape.

Has it been more than 2 1/2 years already Gouache????, Gosh-that has been some fun painting times…

While I am still peering from below at where I would like my illustration to be at, it’s years like this I think it’s important to check in with yourself and acknowledge and appreciate when you’re skills have grown, and that I have actually learnt a couple of things about Gouache.

Of course, these are things that have worked for me and help me to keep in the flow of creating- rather than heading into overanalysis stasis, and may not work for every unique brain out there.

So these are my gouache paints,

Pretty right?

(I stuffed the tin with foam for effect, what you see is what I have… :)

And so this is my palette,

…complete with ‘dirty’ reusable previous colour mixes to neutralise out your tones, or mix colour values.

Unless I am doing a Large piece which requires a lot of fresh paint, I work from a dried palette and use a water dropper to drop a 2-3 drops of water onto each colour to rehydrate paints prior to painting.

I squeeze a small amount of paint into this palette, a small amount goes a long way, keeps fresher ( if you store them for more than a few days without letting them dry, some Fungi may grow…) and is likely to have less neighbouring colour contamination.

My art desire grew out of photography so I think of colours like a gamut; very similar to the colour wheel.

Artist Colour Wheel pdf by handprint

Colour choice is as personal as your lover. The aim of my palette is to get the brightest and most saturated colours I can, and just desaturate or neutralise a colour when needed. So I try to get a good coverage of the spectrum, with close but distinct hues from points around the edges of the gamut.

(I won’t digress into the subtractive versus additive mixing of colours of (reflective colours) pigment, dyes and (emitted colours) light, or insist that this is why you will create more tones with CMY than RGB primary paints…, so)

As a visual person, this helps me see when a colour needs to be more or less blue or red, or if it needs to be less saturated. The paint in my palette is in this order (recalibrated to the ROYGBIV order) with saturated colours running the ring around the outside and more neutral tones in the middle wherever they fit. This helps me to get the colours I want at a glance, rather than having to stop and think (*bonus) when my painting flow gets confused by the unorderly jumble of colours in front of me.
I tend to see and feel the colours, thinking confuses my output vision and therefore the lay down of paint.

One trick I learnt a few years back with my oil painting portrait study with 4 random (ordered) colours was to pay attention to the value of colour more than its actual colour. Even when a colour is wrong it still looks ok to the eye, but when the value is out your mind won’t believe the image it sees.

- I’m ok with not painting Photo realistically 100% true to colour.

Looking where you want to put the colour, gauging the colours around it and then visualising the colour to put there and then visually matching that with a colour in front of you, also helps to reduce the colours appearance change when viewed in certain combinations (a grey can look light or dark depending on the value of surrounding colours, similar for many hues)

However, with Gouache there can be a big drying shift that changes a colours value or hue once the paint has dried, and can be quite a shock.
A helpful tool is to have a palette swatch as a guide so when you are painting and think what colour do I put here, visualising it with your mind and looking at this swatch will help you get a hue which will dry to a much closer value.

Useful Palette Swatch, shows true hue and value of dry Gouache, no drying shift shock

While a palette swatch can take a little time, it is an invaluable step for maintaining the flow for your painting while making those colour mixes, especially if you are a visual thinker.

The general theory of Goauche drying shift is that lighter colours will dry darker and darker colours will dry lighter. To observe this shift I have swatched out my palette in duplicate, the second swatch of each colour was photographed while it was still wet.

From my results, I am not sure this rule holds true for my hues.
The light-mid hues were 4:3 getting lighter or darker, 1 with no change, the mid-dark hues were one equally for lighter, same and darker, the only significant change was the mid-tones where 4 got lighter, 4 the same and 8 got darker.
Of course mix consistency and colour contamination may play a role here, but I think I should disregard that rule and stick to my palette swatch, and in a pinch maybe assume a mid tone may be twice a likely to darken.

NB. Some Gouache will crack when dried and pop out of it’s tray, especially if you are taking your palette off the beaten track, my Gouache stays inside so I don’t have much to say here, it works fine this way.

Above is for traditional Gouache only, NOT ACRYLA/ acrylic gouache, which I suspect would behave more like an Acrylic.