Painting with Gouache

Gouache painting of 3 fishermen in a dory on the Colorado River

So I recently started painting with Gouache media and found it very satisfying.

This is a studio work up from a photograph and is done on plain paper in my 11″x14″ sketch book.

While researching the medium I noticed that gouache is typically used in a very saturated and mostly opaque style common to advertising and graphic illustrations and looses the subtlety and transparency of watercolor.

I found this to be limited as it was demonstrated and so I began to experiment with blending very diluted layers of paint on top of one another.

The result was more akin to what is seen in watercolor with the added advantage of being able to overlay lighter color on top of dark which is nearly impossible to do successfully in watercolor.

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