beginning with gouache | create a stay-wet palette, smooth gradients & paint a landscape

1. beginning with gouache: Gouaches are beautiful flat-map, opaque, water-based medium that's great for artists and illustrators and everything in-between. In this class, we'll learn the basics of gouache starting with how it differs from other water-soluble mediums, what supplies you need, and how to make your own palette that keeps your paint wet and workable. We'll practice achieving the perfect consistency for blocking and flat colors and learn how to make smooth gradients and apply all of the above and a landscape painting walk-through. Come paint along with me, Erin Kate Archer, an artist and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York and we'll learn everything you need to know about getting started with gouache. 2. why gouache?: Why gouache? Gouache has a lot of different great attributes and some drawbacks just like any medium. But in this class we're going to look at gouache through the lens of different water-soluble mediums, starting with watercolor, which is a natural complement to gouache and a good step if you are watercolorist, it's a good idea to learn gouache is well to, expand your talents. Watercolor is a transparent water-soluble paint and like gouache, it consists of pigment and gum arabic. It's sold as heart cakes or in tubes and it can be thinned with water. It dries quickly. It's almost translucent and it's a matte finish. An artist can layer watercolor paint due to a translucency, to create a brighter image, so you can create really beautiful pieces that are full of light. Some drawbacks, it requires thick paper and it can be problematic to cover up a mistake when using watercolor paint due to it's translucent factor. You also have to save the whites of the paper in order to create white in watercolor because you are not able to lighten up the paint itself. You have to plan ahead, which can be difficult if you are say, painting in plain air. Next we have gouache. Gouache is a water-soluble opaque paint. It's often called opaque watercolor because it is also pigment combined with gum arabic. It is most often used by illustrators and fine artists studies. It was previously used a lot in the graphic design industry before software's like illustrator became the industry standard. It is opaque but becomes translucent when water is added and it can be reworked on its surface long after the artwork is completed, just like watercolor can. Next we have acryl gouache, I'm not even sure if I'm saying that correctly. It's not really in my wheelhouse, but acryl gouache is literally a cross between acrylic and gouache. It is basically an acrylic paint that dries matte like gouache does. Then we have acrylic, which unlike gouache and watercolor, is a little more forgiving because it's a deeper, thicker base paint as opposed to that translucent look. Acrylic paint is used by artists who are prepared to work really quickly because each layer of acrylic dries very fast, once it's been exposed to air. These paintings are considerably brighter then paintings created with watercolors due to watercolors drying down a little bit more desaturated and the finish is very shiny, which again can be a pro or con, depending on your preferences. You can't rework acrylic paint once a piece is completely dry like you can with gouache paint, just like I mentioned with the acrylic wash and this means that both of these types of paints will ruin your brushes if you let it dry on them, so beware. Acrylic, in my experience is generally more expensive than watercolor gouache, although it may just be because acrylic is generally used in a larger scale than the small paper-based watercolor and gouache. Here we have all of the different mediums, you can see how the watercolor shines right through that dark line. The gouache and acrylic gouache and acrylic all cover it up and that acrylic at the bottom is super shiny. That's really the basics of these water-soluble mediums. Why should you gouache? Gouache can basically transcend the boundaries of many mediums. Gouache has the opaque qualities of oil, both easy clean up and no poisonous spirits. Has the water solubility of acrylic without drying out and ruining your brushes, and it has the ability to be transparent like watercolors. You can also have the travel capability and ease of setup like you can with watercolor. It also drives flat, matte and is great for illustration. 3. supplies: A quick note about supplies for this class, the supplies you'll need will basically be the same as if you're doing a watercolor project, except for, of course you need gouache. So I would recommend you start off with the primary palette like red, blue, and yellow, and then a white and black. Then if you want to get like a cheap set of gouache, and then you want to spend a little bit more money on one piece, I would recommend you spent it on your white because that is going to be a key component to all of the paintings you do. Next up, we'll have our water cups. I recommend you to have two to keep a clean brush and we need a paper towel just like for watercolor and watercolor paper, I recommend a 140 pound minimum. You could do hot press or a cold press , really personal preference. If you're starting out, I do recommend Hot Press just because it can be a little easier to get that nice, smooth texture that you'll probably be looking for for your pieces. Then we need four brushes. Mainly we're just going to be using it round brush in this class, but if you have a set of watercolor brushes you're already using, those will work as well. I use a size six or eight, usually for most of my work. Finally, we will need a palette, we'll be creating a stay wet palette in this class, but you can also just use a regular old ceramic one or gouache that is already in a pan if you prefer, and I'll be sure to include all my favorites of the supplies in the classic information. So if you're interested in the exact brands I use, I will leave those there. 4. diy stay wet palette: Let's talk pallets for gouache. You can use your typical ceramic or plastic pallets just like you would for watercolor, or use a pen set and just wet it and let it soak in before you start painting. But if you don't like to wait for that or you are working on bigger pieces it's really helpful to have a stay-wet pellet, so this is the commercial version it's basically plastic container. It has a sponge and pallet paper, and through evaporation, the sponge lets some moisture up through the bottom of the palette and it keeps your paint workable. This has been going on on the same set for probably three or four weeks now, so it's really great you don't have to keep throwing away dried-up gouache if you can't stand to wait for it to rehydrate. It's actually criminally easy to make one of these, so all you need for this is a Tupperware container, a sponge, some pallet paper or some parchment paper, I just use parchment paper because it's cheaper, and some scissors. Ideally you'd have your sponge fit exactly to the Tupperware container. If you can find a big sheet and cut it down that's ideal, but I couldn't find that in my Dollar Store, so I have just cut an extra bit of sponge to fit into all of the extra spaces. Then I have already dampen these so they're a little damp and then I throng them out almost completely. Then the next step is to add just a little bit of alcohol. It helps us prevent mold from occurring. Then all you have to do is cut your parchment paper to size, I've already done that because I have part that I'm working with, and then you're ready to paint. When you're done, you can close it up, and it keeps you paint workable. The only thing you need to keep in mind is, you should make sure to store this so it stays flat because if you move it from side to side, the paint is going to leak into the bottom or leak out or any number of bad things. So just keep that in mind, but other than that, super handy and super inexpensive. 5. gouache mixing with white: Something that trips a lot of people is gouache in other mediums is which way do I use for mixing colors? The answer is you want to use this kind of zinc white, not a permanent or titanium white. The reason is a permanent or titanium white is more opaque, it has more pigment particles in the tube and so you'll create more pastel colors if you mix with titanium white. I actually use titanium white a lot in my work. I actually bought this tube just for this demonstration. But because I work in a very pastel color palette. But here I'm going to just add some purple into these two extra containers and I am going to mix up one with titanium white and one with in zinc white and we're going to have a good example of how they dry and why you would want to use one after the other. So now that these are all dry, let's get a good look at them. You can see the titanium has that kind of chalky pastel appearance which I personally love. But if you're looking for a more pure representation of the color, you can use the more transparent zinc white. Both of them are still white, of course, but for mixing purposes it works pretty well. 6. exercises: Next we're going to do some exercise to go through some gouache basics. I've made this on this worksheet for you. If you have the ability to print this out on like a watercolor paper, you can definitely do that. But this is a great tip for both watercolor and gouache. If you have a sketch that you really like you can, on the back of it, do up a wash of just regular pencil. Then if you flip it over and you trace it, just go round each shape. I haven't done this one yet here. It can transfer your sketch over very lightly onto the page. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see it on camera, but it's a really light sketch, which is perfect for watercolor. It's less important for gouache since it is opaque, but handy nonetheless. First we're going to go over blocking consistency. These colors should be done a little too creamy and flowing [inaudible] before being applied to the paper. If you're having trouble with it, a hot pressed or smooth paper can also help the overall effects. So maybe use a mixed media paper instead of watercolor paper like I'm using. I prefer the rough texture. But if you're just doing some studies and starting out in my big idea. So oftentimes you want to have mixed a large batch of color because with gouache, it often dries different than how it looks straight out of the tube. So if you have a light-colored, it'll dry darker. If you have a dark color, it'll dry lighter. So if you're painting a large surface area, you want to mix up a large batch of paint. When you watch people paint with gouache, myself included, people often just add water to their paint as they're going, but if you are just starting out, I recommend mixing your paint to the proper consistency to get a feel for it in the palette before you move on to doing that. So the idea here is we're going to add just enough water that allows it to be more of a flowing consistency. I've read that you should mix it until only one drop of paint will fall off the brush when you lift it up. But I found that to be a little bit too water for my taste. Unfortunately, it's really just a personal preference and practice to get the correct consistency. I would say it's more of putting before it's been set consistency. So just play with that until you can get a nice flat shape, and we're going to fill in our first row of this worksheet. If you are really having trouble mixing the correct consistency, I recommend making a whole page of shapes. Our goal here is to get nice, flat match color where you can't see the brush strokes. You don't want to use the color [inaudible] tube, because it's likely to crack. So if you like that really brushy look, you might want to look at using acrylics instead or oils. So while those are drying, we're going to experiment with other kinds of consistencies. So if you are doing something, say, doing a sketch before you start your big piece, you'll want to dilute your color and you can actually get an effect that's almost indistinguishable from watercolor if you add more water. So I'm just adding more water to my palette here. We are going to make swatch of color and then blend it into the center. You can see how this would be great for sketching because it's nice and transparent and it'll be easy for you to cover up as you move on to blocking colors. One of the magic elements of gouache too, is that you are able to create bleeds like you can with watercolor, and you can also scrub away color after it's dried. So I will demonstrate that with this block here once it dries. And then we're going to jump to the bottom of the page to demonstrate layering. So one of the big, most important and hardest aspects of gouache for me is layering and you have to wait for everything to be completely dry. So I'm just filling in this row of triangles here. With our blocking consistency, not our sketching watercolor consistency. Then it's an exercising patience. You have to wait for it to completely dry before we layer over it or else you will lift up the color. While we're waiting for that to dry, we can do a diluted mixture for our pointed pen, which is really great aspect of gouache. You can use it basically like an ink because it's opaque. So I have a pointed pen up on here, and I'm just going to pick up that blocking consistency we've already created, Down into my pen and create some lines. I want to make sure you have enough gouache. You do have to fill it more often than you would with, say, an ink, just because you don't have a pot to dump them into. So you can get great lines with that. So now that this is all dry, we can see some of the magic of gouache that you might not get with other mediums. So I'm just going to wet my brush, just water, no paint on here, and I'm going to scrub away the paint. It's just like magic. You can just dump it away and you can get really great effects with this, like if you want to scrub it away to make some sparkles of water, anything you do with watercolor, and then you still have the ability to go in and add white on top because of the opacity. So it's really great for a smudging out your brush strokes making they're really nice with soft focus effect. Then the other thing that's so great about gouache is the opacity. So I have added some white to my blue here. Something that can be really helpful is if you feel like you're wasting a lot of paint, you can actually use something like this that has a rubber tip and it will absorb the paint when you're mixing. So I've added some white, and I'm just going to mix that up again to our blocking consistency. Then I'm going to layer over our triangles. If you're an acrylic or an oil painter, and this might not seem very exciting for you. But if you're a water colorist, this is super exciting because usually you wouldn't be able to layer light over dark, let alone have a beat opaque and cover up your, the shapes below. So now that we've got a good handle on these basics, we can learn about making nice smooth gradients. 7. gradients (to white): One of the great things about gouache is it can be used in so many different ways. You can use it really thick like acrylic paint or you can really water it down to be used like a watercolor. For creating nice gradients, we want something in the middle like that blocking consistency. I'm going to just show you how you can see the straight from the tube color versus rarely watered down. To get lovely smooth gradients like this, we'll definitely need that blocking consistency. These are just one color to white gradients which are great for practicing. What we're going to do now is we're going to do four different ways you can create gradients with gouache. I've already gone ahead and I have taped out my paper and digits, four sections. You don't have to do it exactly like this. If it's easier for you to just do four pieces of paper, you are more than welcome. For our first gradient, I am going to lay down a light wash of just plain water. Then I am going to go in with my color, and I'm starting with just straight from the tube because I don't need to add extra water since it's already on the page. This helps get that blocking consistency really easily. Then I am going to add my white at the bottom and then blend up to the top and then really move both of those colors together with the same brush. I'm using a flat brush here, which I do find helps a lot with creating nice smooth gradients. Although you can definitely achieve the same effect with a round brush. Then I'm just going to take my clean brush. You don't see it on screen by actually wiping off the water with this. I'm going to go the other direction to smooth out any of those lines. For the next one, I am also going to add a wash of water quickly. This time, instead of adding white to the bottom of our gradient, I'm actually going to start with a blocking consistency at top and then slowly add more water as we get down towards the bottom of the page and that will thin out the opacity and create that nice one color gradient. It's one of the great things about the gouaches. You could have the opacity on the top and then just thin it out towards the bottom. Although it depends on the type of piece you're doing, this gradient maybe not work depending on if you're trying to cover anything up, down at the bottom of the horizon. Next up I'm going in thick. I have a lot of paint on my brush with just a little bit of water and I'm giving myself a nice big work area to blend this out. Next, I'm going to add in a little bit of white to my color here and create a band here. We're going to just create bands all the way down with lighter and lighter colors until we reach the end of the horizon with an almost pure white. I've got just a bit left of the pink on my brush and I'm just going to work my way back up. Working in this way it averages out all of your layers because if there's a little imperfection on one side, but you go over it again and there's imperfection on the other side, they average out and create nice smooth gradient. I make sure to keep a clean brush. This is why I love having two cups of water for using gouache because if I left it this thick, it would probably crack. But I'm scraping off a little bit of paint each time I go over with a brush or at least averaging it out a little bit more, making sure it's a nice even coat. This can give me a nice soft gradient. If you're finding your paints getting a little difficult to deal with, you can also spray a little bit of water over top and this can help you smooth out those final bits and just reactivates your paint, lets you really smooth out the edges. Then for our last one, we're going to go in with the same amount of paint, nice and thick. We're going to do the same banding method as before. Then here is where the magic happens. I'm going to take this giant fluffy brushes is actually for acrylics, I believe. I don't super recommend it because you'll see that I get a hair stuff in my painting, but you take a big fluffy brush with no water on it. We're just going to smooth away the edges. This is how I get the most perfect gradient that I've discovered so far. Yes, you can see I had a little hair there. That's unfortunate, but look how nice and smooth gradient as you really need a lot of paint on your page in order to work this technique. But meanwhile when it comes together it's so perfect and smooth, definitely worth it. Highly recommend. With that, we have three methods for making gradients in gouache. I'm really interested to see which ones you prefer. Obviously, my favorite is that last one, but it can be a little finicky. Can't wait to see your gradients. 8. gradients (multi color): Now we're going to use that same blending and gradient technique with a little bit more difficult gradients. I'm going to do multi-colors here. You'll see I've masked out a skinnier, longer shake. This is really necessary for Galatia if you're going to do a multi color gradient because it's just so difficult to get a nice, clean line and you need more room to blend those colors. I've got all my colors squeezed out here. I'm going black to white with a sunset color in the middle. Like some blues and some reds and oranges. If you like the look of brushstrokes, there are some artists that do this really well with the brushstrokes with qwash if you've ever seen the work by one canoe to they come to mind. They always leave some sketchy brush marks in there skies and it can actually be very lovely. If you want to have a nice smooth gradient, you'll need a lot of paint and a bit of patience and a big fluffy brush. I'm just going to go through, I'm adding a little bit more paint here because I'm not quite reaching my next step. I'm just using my same flat brush and I am going all the way down. You can see in the middle here I'm getting that lovely purple transition and I'm just with a clean brush going back and forth over until I can blend out those lines. When I get down to the very bottom, I like to have a perfectly clean brush and then go and starting with the white and then pulling that up so I can maintain some of that pure white at the bottom or close to pure white, I guess I should say. Obviously there's still a little bit because my water is dirty actually both cups powder of my water dirty at this point being a Sunday, I'm gonna have a studio that has a sink in the room, but I can't get up to in the middle of the lesson. I'm just pulling down the paint and leaving that bottom strip as pure white as I can keep it. Here's where the magic happens. I am going to pull out my big fluffy brush again and give this a nice smoothing over while it's still wet. We'll be left with a beautiful soft multi color gradient. This is obviously great for skies, galaxies and could be used for any number of things. These technique can be used for shading and any other applications where you need a nice smooth line. Some troubleshooting things if you're having trouble getting a smooth gradient no matter what you do. The first is paint quality. Unfortunately, those that are a little bit less of a good quality are a little more transparent and can be harder to get a nice clean gradient with. It could be that you're lighter colors since they have more titanium whitening them. If you're using darker colors, then they are composed of less opaque pigments. The darker the color, it's actually more difficult to get a smooth gradient. You can remedy this by adding a little bit of white. It'll change your color slightly, but it will also increase the opacity and reduce streakiness. The next thing is if you're using a natural brush, it can actually hold too much water, which is something you love in watercolors, but it can be a little bit of a new sense when you're trying to get a smooth gradient Nick wash. You can try using brush that is first of all synthetic. Second of all you can try using brushes for acrylic for some reason, these brushes, I guess because of their ability to hold bus water can create a nice, smooth canvas. Another solution is to just soak your paper before you start. This can just smooth out all of your nooks and crannies so that you can have a nice smooth surface to work on. You can also use a bigger brush. The smaller your brush, the more brushstrokes you are going to have naturally. Then the final thing I'll leave you with is, are you looking to close out your gradients? Because it's very unlikely that you're going to be looking at super close up at or someone else. Take a step back and just squint your eyes a little bit. You may notice that your gradients are smoother than you thought. 9. gouache painting walkthrough pt 1: I have my stay wet palette all prepped for this walk-through. I like to set my palette this way with a big spot of white because my work is quite pastels, so I use a lot of white, and in this case, it's mixing color as well, so I recommend you do the same. We're using Australian-blue and orange-red, and a yellow ocher, plus white and black, and I'm using the ZenART supplies brushes there. Really inexpensive, and I really like them. I'm using the eight flat and the ten round. I've got my colors washed up here, and the first thing we're going to do, is we're going to start mixing our colors. I'm going to start with my lightest color, which is going to be a really pale, yellow, paler than that. My aim is to get an also cream color. If I were painting this on my own, I would probably start right now doing my swatches, but since you guys are coming along with me, I'm going to clean my brush out, and make my next color, which is going to be the orange red, plus white, plus little yellow. We're not going to do straight up orange red. It's a little too harsh for this guy. We're doing more of a like yellow-orange. But adding the orange red makes our next color be more of a pale gray rather than a green, which can happen if you mix red and yellow. I'm sure know. Better yellowy orange. I have my two glasses of water because it's a lot of paint to clean off, especially if you're mixing a lot. This is another reason why I like to go right in to painting my swatches rather than mixing up all my colors, because it does waste a lot of paint. Then last is the blue, mixing blue with white, and then a little bit of our orangey red color. We don't want to use the blue straight out of the tube because it's a little bit too strong. We're adding white for a little bit of opacity, and to make it lighter, and we are adding a bit of the orangey red to make it a little bit duller, a little softer. Now we have our three colors that we're going to mix from. I can just swatch these for you, we got sky blue, our peachy orangey red, and our pale yellow, which is the one that's [inaudible]. This is why we have two glasses of water. Our pale yellow which should not have any blue in. I got some new water, just make sure we have super clean everything, and I will link the reference photo that we're using. Actually took this a couple years ago. You're welcome to use it for your posts, and don't worry about social media, unless you have my permission. We're going to start out with some white in our flat brush. Just straight up way, and we're going to mark where our sun's going to go. I'm thinking the sun's going to go right here, so we can have a nice long gradient from the blue to the bright yellow. Then our mountains will go around here, and then the rest just a little bit, will be the lake. I've got my white there and then I'm going to mix a little bit of the yellow and my white, and just take the brush around this little rainbows shape. This will create our light source, and I'll keep going like that until I am just using my yellow color. Then I will spread that out on either side, and I don't need to worry at this point about having a perfectly straight line because of a opaque nature. I can worry about that when the time comes. You just want to make sure that you have enough water and things going on smoothly. Everything that we learned about the gradients. Just going to add some white paint here, and I'm going to pull it out and making little summaries in to the yellow. That'll be our sun, doesn't look like much now, but once we start really having a gradient that will be clear. If you're a beginner, I would recommend you doing this whole gradient, and then coming back and doing the lake. But in my case, I'm going to just start right out with doing both. I'm going to take my yellow, and I'm going to skip a little bit where the mountains are, where the trees will be, and add my yellow mixture where the reflection of the water will be. This just saves me from having to go back in and waste more paint, and rinse my brush off, and just being a little lazy. Our next step, is to make some of our orangey red mixture and our yellow. We're going to add that on top, and then do the same down here, and then move into straight orangey red down here, making sure it's opaque. Remember we are blending with paint and not water, because we don't want it to be strict with that nice solid met swatch look and seem, appear. Our next step is to add some of our blue into our orangey red mixture. This is going to be our transitional color. You can see it on the reference pictures in the middle between those color box where it's almost a gray. It's very desaturated in-between the colors, and so here it's a warmish grew, and I'm not going to have that on the bottom, but I am going to save that colleagues were being used that for our lake. Then I'm just going to work on making that trigger transitions as smooth as possible, and then I'm going to do a strip of our blue at the top. Again, we're just done with our video on the C, we use this later and adding a little bit more of each of these colors until we have a nice smooth gradient. If you have any water capture for any paper, make sure you blend them away as soon as you can because it will pick up your paint. We can see here how it's lifted up a little bit. I'm actually going to be coloring over that with our mountains anyway, but if you wanted to cover that up, you just add a little bit more paint, and you'd probably want to activate most of this area so you can make it blend appropriately. We're going to let the struggle come back and we'll do the details. 10. gouache painting walkthrough pt 2: Now that this guy is all dry, we're going to mix up our color for the background details like the trees and the boat and some of these waves in the back here. I'm going to use our little here. I'm still going to add a little bit of white and add a little bit of both colors. It's just helps bring everything together through using all three colors here. I'm just mixing up a mess. This will give us like a off color, purple. It's that's not dark enough. You can add a little bit of black. But be careful with using too much black. Because if you rely on it for contrast, your work can fall pretty plot. I want to mix a fair amount of this color so I don't have to keep mixing it up. That should be pretty good. Since I'm using now, I remembered about my rubber tip guy. I am going to just take this right off of the tip. I'm going to rinse this off and work out the bottom of my tree, so it's hard to see in my photo, but the trees actually, you can't see the difference between where the tree is reflection, where the tree is actually ground. We're going to change that or any use the flat of the brush. To our advantage to make it make a nice flat line. Then use it as a guide, loading up our brush. Going to ups and wavy lines here. Then I'm going take the brush on its side like this and just add some sticking out pieces at the top. You want to decrease your pressure as you go up to make them form into points. If you're unhappy with your sun, you should make sure you take care of that for you get to this step, because the beauty of this effect is the dark trees against the bright up of the sun. Then I am going to leave a little bit of space there and I'm going to mimic my shapes and tried to make a softer version for my reflection. So I'm using a little bit less water or a little bit more water, excuse me and letting it just flow down. Do the same here. I'm not taking too much care about my reflection is matching up just right, because if you take a look at reflection is real, if they really don't and dehumanize is not super good at catching that. Then I'm going to take my brush with no K9, just wet and just mess it up a little bit, make some ripples into the. Already we have pretty convincing effect here. Our trees look a little bit more like grass at this point. I'm going to take my round brush and I'm going to let the brush splayed out a little bit and dip my brush into the very edge and just add some detail. I'm actually going to switch to a very small brush. I've got my very small brush and I'm going to be a little more delicate about my tree shapes. I'm just creating wisps like eyelashes going out from the tree. They're fine because we're only getting really the shadow of them. If you drop a bit of water on your painting like I just did. You want to take the time now to try to get away from some spots is going to stay. Here and do the same thing down here. If you're worried about doing the crux shape, maybe try upside down a couple of strokes to make sure you're going in the correct direction. Then some scrap paper, what was helpful to have some scrap paper around, especially if we need to mix up these colors again, which we will. Then we have those swatches to compare them to because we now know about how gloss dries in so strange ways color wise get. I'm not being too precious about this. I'm just adding details each of these trees that have already drawn, not worrying about it being exactly the same way. Each branch is going to be the same. Our reflections are mighty reflections are not copies. At this point we are going to reuse that same color and I'm actually a stick a mess my brush, I really recommend that you guys have seen beginning this is a fine tip line or by creative mark, but any really tiny brush that you have should work. Then dip back into that color. and I'm going to continue our ripples. I'm just going to use my whole arm, not my wrist for my strays lines possible. If you're concerned, you can obviously take out a ruler for this part. I'm just going to create a bunch of hair lines until about here on the page. They should progressively get bigger as you go. It starts out really thin and then I start, I'm going to start using more of the brush, more water as I get closer. Then we're going to taper off using this color because this is really reacting to the shadows back here. We are going to use our middle gray color and we're going to start adding those and mixing them in to your darker shadows here. Just to make sure it's all unified and has nice depth. I'm also going to take this no gray color and add a little bit of ripples. Make sure you going in straight lines and make tiny ripples to denote where the start of the water is. Then we're going to switch back to our larger round brush and add some bigger ripples in the frontier here. Just using water to react with this and wanting it in. This is one area where you can use water instead of paint because we want a little bit of desaturation in our water because it shouldn't be the same exact intensity as the sky. For going for a little bit more realism. I'm just going to blend that all the way through. We also don't want any harsh lines on your like dry brush strokes that you have. It's going to blend them away. At this point you need to make sure pieces completely dry, but we didn't do a lot of water work for this one, so it should be more or less dry already. 11. gouache painting walkthrough pt 3: We're going to create our boat using that same dark color, and I'm going to start out doing couple practice rounds with my brush. Basically, we're just doing a little classic boat shape. It has a little patch of light in the back, but we're not going to draw that with this brush. I'm going to do a couple of practices. Brushes like these have a long skinny tip. Are actually a little hard to control. I might switch to a shorter one. Looks pretty good. I think I'll stick with that. We're going to go for a shape that's like this, and we're going to fill that guy in. I'm also going to add a little bit of reflection from the sky. It's like [inaudible] in the sea, more like I guess. I'm going to mix our dark mixture with some yellow and white to get a lighter color and create a line that is extending outwards, and just pull that in. Let me do the same. We've personal set here. I realized though it doesn't have a sail, but I think this one needs it. I'm going to take one of my brush with that same dark color into a straight line. Put some mast and seal on either side. If you add this one with me, it's a good exercise in creating reflections without a reference. It's good to extend yourself beyond your reference. You are not just literally copying photos, especially if you're using photos that you didn't take, because really someone else already owns that copyright. Let me make sure I'm doing right by other artists. We've got our mast here. Then we're going to do the same thing here. We're going to create a wildly line leading out from the mast. Wildly line for each side of the sail. We'll create our upside down triangles. Now, I'm going to do the same thing that I did previously up in the trees and take a dry brush and just smudge it out for our reflections. Great. At this point, you could stop, or you could go ahead and add some fun details. Since I had a couple of water reflection, I'm going to go ahead and turn them into stars because it's very common thing in my work, and I think this piece could use them. You're welcome to do that as well. I'm using a Posca pen here and just adding a few dots, not going overboard. Just making our mistakes into something nice. If you want to add a special touch, you can add a few stars into the water as well. It's nice to have that very clear reflection. Now, we've turned our picture, which is a little bit more fantastical, [inaudible] magical, and now, we can take the paper off. 12. creating depth & final notes: Before I leave you, I just wanted to touch on creating depth and gouache before you go off and do your own class projects. Just spending a little time on my sketchbook here. This is the zeta sketchbook by Stillman and Birn, which I really like. Creating depth and gouache. One of the great things about this medium is you can get such a range of values and that's really how you can create this amazing depth of field portal feeling, which is really popular right now on social media. I'm starting here with my lightest colors and with a little bit desaturation for these mappings in the sky and filling in the background before I move forward and this is really great method to use if you want that portal UI feel. Then once I get to the trees, I'm going to mix up a darker color. I'm actually not using black at all here. I'm just mixing this brown with purples and yellows to get a really nice dark color. You can see already how the stark contrast really. The way you get this depth is really playing with your values. I'm working from a photo here, but you can really create this with whatever you would like to have, be in your foreground, be darker and your background be softer in both color and value. I'm just blocking out these trees and I'm going to make sure everything in the foreground has a nice dark. You can also drop the viewers focused by being discerning where you create a lot of details, so in my foreground here, I'm adding some small brush strokes to represent the soil and the rocks that are there and I'm using smother brushstrokes here on the top of the trees. That's really where your viewers eyes are going to go, especially with the contrast between the sky and the trees. It's a great way to guide your viewers eye and get that portal feel. There's something I'd also like to incorporate as a little mixed media. I can go in here with a white pasta pen, which is basically acrylic paint. It's super, super opaque and just adding in my tiniest bits of white highlights at the end. That is the end of this class. Thank you so much for joining me for learning the basics of gouache. I have quite a few other classes if you'd like to check them out. Most of them are on watercolor, but I'm definitely expanding my medium right now and feel free to follow along with me. My handle on everywhere in the Internet is at Ekate Archer, E-K-A-T-E, A-R-C-H-E-R and you can find me at my home on the internet at www.ekatearcher.com. Looking forward to seeing you in the next class.