Have you tried painting in Gouache? If you don't know what it is, a basic description is that it is an opaque water-based paint that dries flat and matte, but can be reactivated with water. You can get acrylic gouache too but thats not what this post is about so we won't focus on that for now.
I first really understood what Gouache was by watching those jelly-gouache paintings that have showed up on my socials feed consistently since 2020. I'm still not sure how to actually say the word 'gouache' but over the past few years I have really started to practice and develop my skillset for painting in gouache.
Historically gouache has been use a lot for posters and design work - it's flat opaque colour creates a really nice base for illustration and high-contrast high-pigment imagery.
I mostly use it to paint botanicals and landscapes.
Here are my tips for painting with Gouache:
- Swatch your colours - create a swatch sheet where you have swatched and let dry all of the colours you have. This creates a really useful reference guide for mixing with and helps reduce waste by getting you closer to your desired mixing colours sooner.
- Swatch out your mixed colours - as you paint a picture, swatch out your mixed colours as you go. This can help if disaster strikes to try and accurately mix a good colour-match. Always use dry shades to match as everything looks different when wet.
- Mix more than you need - this one is probably common sense but always mix more gouache then you think you are going to need.
- Keep your palettes (don't wash them away) - use creative palettes - these could be plates, container lids etc and don't need to be a fancy store bought 'art palette'. If you have plenty to use, then you can let the paint dry and you can reactivate it with water next time so nothing goes to waste. I will often use my saved palettes with small amounts of paints for things like cards and gift tags.
- Add a trio of greens to your collection: You don't need a big set of paints to get started - this is especially useful for botanicals/landscapes but investing in a few different ready-to-go greens can give you a really nice footing. My suggestion would be: a creamy lime, a bright olive, and a dark forest green. These give you a really nice base to mix a myriad of green colours from.
- Buy a big tube of White gouache - seriously, it is the colour you will use the most to enhance and mix beautiful swathes of creamy colour and if you buy a set of little gouache tubes it is likely that you will run of of white well before you run out of any others.
- Get a shade of 'Portrait Pink' for your collection - this is a creamy salmon toned pink shade that will ground sky blues and make greens look more natural when colour mixing.
- Work procedurally: Start background to foreground, block in your colours and then add shadows/highlights from dark to light - it can help to break down a complicated reference or scene into smaller pieces like this and this order of painting is tried and true but especially effective with gouache.
Hope these are helpful for you in starting your own gouache painting adventures!
MB