First Attempts with Gouache

Goo – osh!  Isn’t that a great word?

Anyway, when we were in San Diego awhile back, we found a genuine art store in the neighborhood.  Of course, I had to wander in there, and I finally was able to find water-based gouache paints.  All the ones I ever seem to find are acrylic, which is not what I want.  Today I got them out for the first time and put them onto a palette, leaving space for other colors, which I am sure I will want to add.

I think I need to add a red along the lines of alizarin and a couple of greens, such as Hookers and sap.  I use them a lot in watercolors.

My first picture was quite tentative, but eventually I got a bit more brave.  Sadly, the scanner did not differentiate very well between the yellows in the flowers.  Rather than just one color, I used both to suggest petals.  The greens are straight out of the tube as well as mixed with blue and black.

This next painting is what made me realize I needed an alizarin or something close to it.  The actual flowers are more pink; cad red does not turn pink with the addition of white, nor is very pretty with purple mixed in.  So, I settled on the violet with the addition of white.  The leaves were painted light to dark, and I tried to let the paint dry thoroughly so I could paint around things, such as the flowers, or on top of other colors.  This is how watercolor is done – light to dark.  The pot was done while the paint was still wet and I mixed other colors in as I went along.  That was really a lot of fun just to see the result.  Finally, the shadow was painting on fairly transparently and loosely, only to be covered with more opaque paint.  I rather like the result.

Finally, I remembered that gouache suggests painting dark to light.  Here I placed a black/blue mixture and let it dry.  From there, I applied moss green, but I should have mixed it and the yellows and reds with white so they would dry brighter.  Still, that is a good lesson for the future:.  Darks in gouache dry lighter, and lights dry darker.  Here I applied paint directly and let it dry, as well as mixing it on the paper.

Because paper is so important in painting, I used some 6×8″ 100% cotton paper.  I’m glad I did as there were times when the paper was wet, as when laying down the black background on the painting above.  I really love the fact that I can put lighter colors on dark.  As a kid in elementary school, poster paints were some of my favorite ones for this same reason.

Old dog, new tricks!  Hooked on gouache, indeed!

Dappled Light

It’s been nearly 10 days since my last post.  Nothing traumatic to keep me away from painting – I just have had appointments and social activities accompanied by making sure all my retirement paperwork and insurance is in place for my “official” beginning of being a Medicare recipient on June 1st!  It’s been a slog, but it is in place, and hopefully nothing will make me have to do it all over again.

That said and done, the weather here in California has been really strange.  The new normal!  We have had rain into the month of May, and as a result flowers and plants and butterflies are prodigious, with spring flowers lasting well into what might be considered the summer months.  Even the hills are still colorful, but slowly fading to the usual beige and brown.  The rain, though, fills the bright blue sky with big clouds, sometimes ones which sit around and slowly disperse, sometimes with ones that dance their way across the sky, changing with every glance.  When I was a kid in the middle of nowhere, I loved lying in the hammock and making up stories as the clouds shifted and reformed.  It’s as magical now as it was then.

The local botanical garden is one of my favorite places.  It has so many things to see.  A variety of habitats are represented – desert, Mediterranean, and woodland, to name a few.  Today’s painting is a scene along one of the pathways, from the photo I took below.

I am always attracted to dappled light – the strong contrasts of dark and bright.  Photographically, it is hard to capture, but I was relatively pleased with the way the photo caught it.  I am also fairly pleased as to how I was able to interpret the photo and the light.  It was a struggle, and especially difficult after nearly two weeks of inactivity, but it worked out in the end.