Master the Art of Gouache Paint with These 7 Tips
There are many distinct kinds of painting, including acrylic paint, watercolor, and oil, and each has its advantages and its own set of techniques. You have probably heard of gouache paint when it comes to water-based paints.
Everyone has heard that gouache painting is difficult for beginners to learn. In actuality, using gouache colors to paint is relatively easy. You may learn how to paint with gouache much more easily with the help of the tips in this article. For more information, keep reading.
What Is Gouache?
Gouache is a water-based painting material. Gouache is a flexible painting medium that can be used thinly, like watercolor, or thickly, like acrylic. Like acrylic paint, it dries fast, making it a desirable painting medium. A dry gouache painting that has been diluted with water is like one that has been mixed with a spirit-and-oil mixture. Compared to oil, it is a more recent medium for painting, but painters and illustrators appreciate it.
To get started using gouache on most painting media, including canvas and watercolor paper, you only need a painting palette, a water container, and quality paintbrushes.
Tips to Follow when Painting with Gouache Colors
Do not Confuse Gouache with Watercolor
Despite the overlaps and similarities between gouache and watercolor, they should be applied differently.
The most common mistake people make when using gouache for the first time is to mistake it for watercolors, according to Pooja Shah, a painter in New York City who works with acrylics, watercolors, impasto, and gouache.
The primary quality of gouache is opaqueness. The appropriate amount of water must be used to achieve this opacity and matte finish. Both too much and too little water may cause cracking on the painted surface after the paint has dried. It resembles a watercolor if you use too much water.
The paint must have a viscosity similar to cream and flow freely from the brush. You must assess your grasp of it. Don’t worry. Finding the ideal paint-to-water ratio will get simpler the more you work with the medium.
Create Color Charts and Swatches for Each of Your Paints
It’s easy to get fired up and want to apply your gouache paint directly from the palette to the canvas, but making color charts beforehand will streamline your process and reduce your costs.
It’s a good idea to test your gouache colors before using them, and you might want to create charts of tints and shades—colors blended with white and black, respectively—so you can refer to them [as you paint].
Even if you use paint directly from the tube without shading or tinting, it’s still possible that the color won’t turn out exactly how you wanted it to. Dark gouache colors frequently look a little lighter after drying, whereas lighter colors occasionally look darker than you would expect. Think of it like choosing paint samples to paint your house with or choosing nail polish for a manicure.
Prefer to Use Synthetic Brushes
Contrary to popular opinion, synthetic paint brush work better for painting with gouache than ones made of actual hair. A natural hair brush may hold more water than a synthetic hair brush can. Using synthetic, streakiness may be avoided, and water incorporation can be more readily controlled.
Start with a Small-Scale Project
Everyone has to start somewhere, and for your first few paintings, a basic project and a limited gouache color palette are good places to start. To reduce the likelihood of producing muddy colors on your canvas, keep your palette to three to five hues rather than employing the entire color spectrum.
Pick painting projects that are basic enough to seem pleasurable and feasible. You don’t want to risk being annoyed or exhausted on your first few assignments.
If You’re a Beginner, You Should Always Start with Fresh Paint
A completely dried-out tube can be reactivated with some glycerin and water. The wonderful thing about gouache is that you can reactivate the paint with a few water drops even when it has dried on your palette. However, most skilled artists recommend keeping fresh paint right from the tube for your first few paintings.
One of the trickiest elements of using gouache is probably getting the consistency right. If you use new paint instead of reactivation, your paints will be more consistent. Once you have a clearer idea of gouache paints in general, you can begin experimenting with the consistency of rehydrated paint.
Drying the Base Layer Before Continuing
When working with numerous layers of gouache paint, always wait until the base layer has dried before creating a new one. This is important since the gouache can be quickly reactivated with water if the bottom layer hasn’t dried, causing the following layer to leak into the foundation layer and produce dark colors. The gouache color dries in a short period.
Go Slowly and With Ease as You Paint and Layer
To produce the most stunning effects with gouache, one must use a systematic and practical approach.
Gouache is a sluggish, textured medium for painting. Before filling up the foundation layer, oversized color blocks should be defined. These base layers create a raised border that facilitates color blocking. Since the colors of the subsequent layers will blend with those of the top layer, apply them more slowly. Comparable to the impression of a cat’s tongue, the second layer of gouache painted on top of the first has a lot of texture.
Moreover, it’s best to paint larger patterns first, then smaller ones, to preserve the lower layers of gouache color and design.
Wrap Up
Gouache paint is distinctive, fun, and valuable. Whether you use gouache alone or in combination with other media like acrylic paint, using it will increase the range of creative expression alternatives you have.
In terms of gouache painting, there aren’t many strict guidelines. Sometimes the finest methods include a little testing and experimenting and seeing how your work develops. The abovementioned tips will help you improve your painting abilities while enabling you to deal with gouache paints. Skriblbox provide the best art supplies material.
