Technically not one of the course exercises, but I worked on this piece while listening / watching to the course and trying to be mindful of the information shared by the teacher.

As a teen I used to paint dabble a bit with watercolors, but in the last couple of years I mostly worked digitally in Procreate on my iPad. I've been itching to get back to paper, so now I'm trying to get some technical knowledge under my belt that would help me better understand the media I'm using. In the past few months I bought a bunch of Acrylic Gouache colors, but my experience with them is still limited. I'm especially struggling with finding a  coherent colour palette within a piece and the flatness / streakiness of the medium.

This course and the one from Kate Cooke (Adventures in Gouache: Painting and Pattern Making Techniques) have been really helpful. 

Takeaways from the course: 

- the wetness of the paint and the wetness of the brush are two different things

- brush size matters

- write down color mixes for future reference + start a sketchbook (or a collection of papers) where you test color mixes that you can use for reference later one

- find what feels good to you (in brushed that feel good, paper that makes you sigh happily when the paint goes on just right, and paint thickness that works for how you paint) 

- get yourself a towel to dab your paint on for gouache and water color (so much better than the thousands of paper towels that are all over my desk and get way too wet)

- try to mix acrylic gouache in a plastic mixing palette with the round insets so the paint stays wet longer

 

Paints used:

Turner Acryl Gouache Mixing White, White, Olive Green, Deep Green,  Permanent Yellow, Permanent Yellow Orange, Pink, Permanent Scarlet, Mixing Violet. I only used mixed colors for this piece, none of them came straight from the tube.

Caran d'Ache Charcoal Grey Pencil for finishing touches

 

Favorite mixed color: Olive Green + Permanent Yellow for a nice light but still bright green. Tone it down with white to get a pale goose egg green.