Hello and welcome back! I have been busy working on all things printmaking for my art fair coming in March. But I have discovered something new I would like to share. I have been seeing these wonderful paintings on Instagram and Pinterest for a while, finally, I started looking into them more and learned that they were all gouache painting. Needless to say, I bought some paint and tried my hand at it.

Gouache paint is described by most as if watercolor and acrylic paint had a baby. Gouache paint is a water-based paint but is more opaque than watercolor. It’s this weird medium, you can treat as if it is a watercolor or you can apply it thick like acrylic. If done well you can achieve some really nice effects with it. One of the great things about gouache paint is that it has a lovely matte or velvet finish to it.

I come from a watercolor background in painting and don’t have much experience with oil or acrylic. With watercolor, you use lots of layers and you build up the darks and keep the lights. It’s the opposite of oil
and acrylic adding lights last. I was doing some research on how which technique was best to use for the gouache since it’s between. After some experimenting, I found that treating it as more of an acrylic
works better for me. I start with my medium tones first and add layers of dark and light depending on
what I needed.

My first couple attempts were definitely a learning curve and didn’t turn out that well but with each one a got a little better and I gained more confidence with the medium.

My second painting, working on technique

Here is a look at my paintings in order from the first to most recent one. This was my first painting I did, I was painting on my printmaking paper which was a little thin for the gouache and it end up curling. For this one, I was trying to treat it as more of an watercolor using layers and building up darks. It got pretty muddy and washed out. I learned a lot from it. The second one I did I decided to copy a painting I found from Pinterest and focus on technique. It really helped to treat the gouache more as an acrylic. I was pretty happy with the result, especially with the sky.

Feeling more confident I decided to paint the next three on wood. I actually found that painting on wood was really nice and made applying layers a litter easier. I did one of a sunset in Gunnison, Colorado (where I went to college). You can really see the velvety finish on the bottom where its dark.

The next painting I was working off a few different pictures just making my own landscape, wanting a meadow/ green farmland with rolling hills in the background. I was wanting a mix between Oregon and Iowa. I was originally going to do a sunrise but I used too much orange and it became another sunset. This one ended up being my favorite so far. I like how all the colors blended together.

My latest painting was another made up landscape. I was wanting a rain painting, I can remember driving to Colorado for college in May and in August and off in the distance would be clouds filled with rain. I love how the clouds interact and blur the rain-soaked ground. I decided to paint a pasture keeping it simple and focusing on the clouds.

Overall I am enjoying this new medium and will definitely keep working with it. I am going to link a YouTube video I watched about gouache, its long (40 minutes) but she talks about different techniques, differences between gouache and watercolor and some other related things about gouache. If you are interested in gouache feel free to watch it, if not no worries!

Thank you all again for your support! Next week I will be having a studio update showing a lot of work I have been doing. Please sign up for my emails so you can automatically know when I post the latest blog post ( sign up below). Also feel free to follow me on all the social media and finally, if you haven’t yet checked out my new shop, click “shop” on the menu bar! I added a couple new pieces to it : ]

Bryan.