Beyond Watercolor: Learn to Paint with Gouache | Leah Goren | Skillshare
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Beyond Watercolor: Learn to Paint with Gouache

teacher avatar Leah Goren, Illustrator

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:30

    • 2.

      Gouache Overview

      2:50

    • 3.

      Materials & Supplies

      5:04

    • 4.

      Technique I: Wet on Wet

      7:43

    • 5.

      Technique II: Graphic Shapes

      13:19

    • 6.

      Technique III: Linework

      7:16

    • 7.

      Exercise: Still-life

      5:32

    • 8.

      Maintaining Your Materials

      1:04

    • 9.

      Final Thoughts

      0:40

    • 10.

      What to Watch Next

      0:33

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About This Class

Looking for your next step after watercolor? Learn 3 easy, fun ways to paint with gouache in this beautiful class with illustrator Leah Goren!

As one of the most vibrant, versatile paints available, gouache is perfect for anyone looking to create flowing watercolor washes, bold backgrounds, and fine lines all with the same paint. Join Leah as she shares everything you need to know to get started, from selecting supplies to combining techniques in your final composition. Key lessons include:

  • Choosing (and pronouncing!) your gouache paint and supplies
  • Using water for watercolor effects
  • Layering your paint for a bolder look
  • Linework techniques for adding detail
  • Combining techniques for your final composition

Everyone is welcome to discover the fun and fulfillment of using gouache paint — there’s a reason it’s the favorite of artists and illustrators everywhere! After taking this class, you’ll have everything you need to start painting, experiment with your new medium, and create the work you’ve always imagined.

Meet Your Teacher

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Leah Goren

Illustrator

Teacher

Leah Goren is an illustrator and surface pattern designer living in Southern California. She graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2012 with a BFA in Illustration. Her work spans from surface pattern and product design for clients like Anthropologie and Loeffler Randall, to book covers for publishers including Penguin Random House and Macmillan, to live drawing at events for Kate Spade and Nike.

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Some people might not be familiar with gouache or see it as an intimidating medium. But if there's one thing I want you to take away is that it's really easily accessible, it can be just as fun as any other paints and don't take it too seriously. Hi, my name is Leah Goren. I'm an illustrator in Brooklyn, New York, and in this class we're going to be talking about gouache. I would describe my style as loose, painterly, colorful, feminine, I use gouache for all of my work because I really love how versatile it is. I love how bright the colors are, how you can water it down, or you can use it really thick and opaque and layer it. It's really my favorite kind of paint. Today's class we're going to go over everything you need to know about painting with gouache. We're gonna be going over different materials and how to use them and then diving into techniques and styles. For each technique we'll be drawing a different piece of fruit. We chose fruit because they come in different shapes and colors that might be interesting to draw and it's easily accessible to everyone. Not to mention you can eat it when you're done. At the end, we'll take everything we learned and we'll draw a still life that combines all the different styles. If you're a beginner, this is a really great place to start because we are just going to focus on one technique at a time. Take it slowly and you can figure out what you like and take it from there in your own work. Thanks for taking the class today and I can't wait to see what you guys created. 2. Gouache Overview: I think I knew how to pronounce the word gouache before I knew how to spell it. I still have to think about it if I'm ever typing it out. G-O-U-A-C-H-E. It's not Goweg, Goowache,Goshe. Gouache. Let's break down the main differences between watercolor, gouache, and acrylic. Gouache is a paint that sits between watercolor and acrylic. It's a highly pigmented wet medium. It's usually water-based or at least the way that I use it, but it also comes in an acrylic variety. Because of that, the nickname for it is opaque watercolor. There are a lot of benefits and using gouache over watercolor, gouache paint dries quickly, which means you can easily add multiple layers. This helps for covering up mistakes or making more complex paintings or working outside. I think, especially among beginners, watercolor often overshadows gouache just because the barrier to entry is a little higher. You have to buy a lot of tubes of gouache to get going, at least your primary colors plus black and white. Whereas if you're just starting out, you can easily buy a cheap watercolor palette and you have everything you need. Even though you need a little bit more to get started, those little tubes will last you a really long time and it's worth it in the end. Watercolor needs water added to it in order to be used, and as a result, your painting will be more translucent. Gouache paint contains more pigment and as a result will look brighter and more opaque when the same amount of water is added in. Like acrylic, gouache you squeeze wet out of the tube and mix in as much water as you desire. But unlike acrylic, it's water-based, so it has a little bit of a flatter look, acrylic because it's derived from plastics, tends to look a little glossy or when it dries. Gouache drives with a velvety, slightly chalky finish, very matt, opaque, and highly pigmented. If you added more water though, you can make it look more like a loose watercolor painting. Let's take a look at what each of these paints look like. This first one is water color. As you can see, it's pretty translucent. The color isn't as bright, it's a little more subdued. The second one is gouache, it's still drying right now, so it looks shiny and areas, but as you can see, it's more opaque, more uniform. There's some areas where I had a little bit more water in there that there is some variation in color, but otherwise it's pretty bright and mud. Then this last one is acrylic. I probably wouldn't want to use acrylic on this paper because it's a little thin, but you can see how it's a little globier and drawing a little bit shinier. Now that we have a solid understanding, let's dive into materials and supplies. 3. Materials & Supplies: Your setup for gouache is very similar to what you need for watercolor. All you need is paint, palette, brushes and paper, and a cup of water. I'll give you some suggestions on a good place to start for each of these. First, let's talk about paints. I like to use a water-based gouache. The brand that I stick with is Winsor & Newton because I know that the quality is consistent and good. I would recommend sticking with the paints that say series one or two on them, those are more affordable. A higher series number means that the pigment used is maybe a little rare, a little pricier, but you can get what you need just by sticking with the one or two. If you're a beginner and you're not so familiar with mixing colors, it might be easier to have more tubes, so you don't need to mix as much, but really, the bare minimum you need are your primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. I like to maybe have a magenta or a purple. Some different colors of green are nice too, and then a black and a white. With those basic colors, you can mix about any color that you might imagine. I do have some favorite colors that I like to work with. One of my favorites is called Linden green. It's a really fun, bright, limy, yellow green. I also really like Naples yellow, which is a light creamy yellow and I think it's really nice to have a deep purple on hand because it's rich in velvety and can be a nice substitution for black. Next, let's talk about paper. Overall, you want something that's going to hold water well and not going to ripple. Watercolor paper works really perfectly for gouache. You can use the classic cold press that has that rippled texture. I don't personally prefer it, but I like hot press which has a smooth surface. In art supply stores, you can also find brands like Strathmore that make multimedia paper that's smooth and can work really well for your gouache painting. You can also try printmaking paper that might be a little fancier. You can get a nice deck old edge or find fun colors that comes in. Everybody always asks me what my favorite paper is and what's the sketchbook I use is and it's by a brand called Kunst and Papier. You can buy it online through Amazon or a quick Google search and it's called the binder board sketchbook. I like the sketchbook because the paper is thin but it still holds water and the medium well. It's not too precious feeling. Sometimes when you use paper or when I use paper that feels too nice, it just gives me too much anxiety, too much pressure to make the most perfect painting ever. I need something that feels a little bit more throwaway to take that pressure off and just loosen up. I use a Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush, usually in a size 2 or 3. It's pointed, so the tip can achieve really fine detail, but the body of it is also large enough that I can paint in bigger areas if I need to. When you're choosing a brush, you should think about how big your paper is, how much detail you want to achieve, maybe, where you're painting or the style you want to paint in. I like to use a smaller brush because I can achieve more detail. But, if I want to loosen up, if I want to force myself to get outside of my comfort zone, I might want to use a bigger brush, something like this even uses a lot of paint but can be really fun to try. I wouldn't worry too much about the quality of the brush that you get. If you're just starting out, I would say something mid-grade will work well. If it looks good and it feels good in the store, I think you'll be able to make a good drawing with it. I'd maybe not recommend getting something with stiff plastic bristles. It's made for preschooler though, you could probably make an interesting drawing with that too. Anything will really do for a palette. If you're on the go and you brought your paints with you and forgot to bring your palette, I'll just take maybe a takeout lid or something that I find on hand like a cup out of the trash can, maybe not really, but, what I really like is something that's going to keep my colors separated. I'm partial to this ceramic palette. It's really not expensive. It's probably less than $10 in any art supply store or online, but I like that it's heavy and when it's on your desk, you can't just push it around so easily, it'll stay in place and gets the job done. Some of you have asked how I handle my palette. Do I clean it off every time? The answer is no. I leave the colors to dry until it gets pretty dirty. I like them to be there as a guidance for where I end up squeezing the new colors onto. If I have a green section, I know I can go back and use the paint that's on there, but then continue to add green, for example. One of the benefits of gouache and having a water-based paint is that you can very easily clean your palette out. Acrylic, you have to scrape it off if it dries and you can also go back and reuse the colors that you left behind. On my palette today, I cleared off the right side so we can use that for the exercises we're doing soon. But, on the left side I decided to leave it dirty just so you could see what by pallet usually looks like. Now that we're all set up, let's dive into the first exercise. 4. Technique I: Wet on Wet: The first style we're going to be doing is wet on wet, mixing wet paint with other wet paint on our paper. It works really well for blending colors together seamlessly, making gradients, adding subtle shadows, anything where you don't want such a clean, crisp edge. For this exercise, we're going to draw a peach, which we have here. I think it's perfect for this because we have these pretty reds bleeding into oranges and yellows and that's going to translate really well from mixing wet paint colors together. Before we begin painting, I want you to think a little bit about where all your supplies are on the desk. I like to keep my palate next to me. I really don't want to be reaching for anything. I find that maybe if my water is over here and then I dip the brush and I end up dripping water onto my painting and ruining it. I want to keep the water close to me. I like to have a paper towel to dab my brush onto after it's wet and I like to keep that under my palette. But again, as you paint, see where your hand is going, notice what feels comfortable. If anything, doesn't feel comfortable, just start moving things around until it does. Getting started, I'm going to look at the peach and select my colors. I can see here, I'm going to want yellow, orange, red, a deeper red, purple. Then go to the colors that I have on hand and see how I can begin to mix those. I've got some yellow on there, I do have orange, I don't usually use my orange that much because I can just put a little red in with yellow and sometimes it's easier than like getting that tube out. I'm actually going to take a little bit of purple out because some of these areas are so dark that they're almost brown or black and mix that with the red, I might get that color. Yeah, little red plus purple ended up being that color. What I did is I just started with a section of that dark red, but then this is where the wet on wet comes in. I want to add a little more shading down here, so I just dip my brush back in that purple and just adding it on here, it blends in and makes a darker area. I'm using just three colors; yellow, red, and purple. But within these three colors, I can mix orange, I can mix a darker yellow, I can mix a deep red, a red purple and I'm blending them together on the page to create a full spectrum that goes beyond just three. Really feeling it out and doing one color at a time and blending it together as I go. Some of it is thinner and some of it's thicker and that's okay. Although now I'm looking and seeing that maybe this yellow isn't popping out as much as this yellow, so I'm going to go back and mixing even lighter yellow and just dab that on top and see what happens. I'm just trying to be loose with everything. Like this isn't the best driving I've ever done, but I could take the same technique, took what, a minute and I can do the same peach five times and then maybe end up with one that I'm really happy with. Some of the ways that this the first one dried, I feel maybe the paint was a little watery. I'm doing the second one and just try to put everything down a little bit thicker this time like this, still letting these little accidents happen in the blending and see what happens here. Using this wet on wet method, it allows us to add some tonal variations to anything that we're drawing. It might be an objects that are more simple. If I'm drawing a face, I have to think about the way that it's a three-dimensional object in the world and how light bends around it. It's like makeup contouring where you're like making it a little darker on the outside so that that part recedes and even if your drawings are abstract, that something you can do to make them feel a little more realistic, I left some little white spaces to give it a loose haphazard feel, not concerned with filling out the entire page. Maybe I'll make the stem that a greenish color. Somebody liking that one more. This is the most purpley one we have. Really just observing and mixing my colors onto my palate and then onto the page as I go. Since I'm painting a little bit more free form, I'm not just sticking to exactly what I had mixed out initially. Those are already looking there and the first one, adding a little bit more darkness over here and I give it some more dimension. But I do think as I'm doing this, I'm handling the paint more translucent than I would another styles. I could try another one and painting it more thickly. But it might also just be the nature of this object that makes me feel doing it that way. I'm just taking up a little paint at a time and then dabbing water when I need it. That one is thicker and you're pretty much getting the same thing really to actually like that more because like this area, the purple, now that's drying it is even reading. Is that dark because it's so water down here, it's better. Peaches can be pretty tough to draw, but I think it's a good place to start because it gives you a lot of different colors to play around with within one object. But feel free to draw it a few times and maybe pick your favorite drying. 5. Technique II: Graphic Shapes: The next technique we're going to do, I'm calling graphic shapes, where going to paint out flower, slightly more abstract, bright colors in order to create a more playful or stylized image. In this style, we're not going to blend any colors on the paper, Instead, we're going to mix our colors ahead of time on the palette before we decide where to paint them. For this exercise, we're going to use a strawberry because it has more of graphic detail to it, has the seeds on top, which we're going to look at as a separate element, and then the leaves also on it. I'm going to put my strawberries out here to look at. We want to start with a red for the base clearly, but the question is, what red? I think I'm going to take the liberty to paint these strawberries, not exactly as they appear in the world, but add a playful touch to it. Maybe I want it to more on the magenta side. I'm going to put a little bit of this color that's called Opera pink on to my palette, it's pretty bright pink. But then I'm going to mix in a little red to it too, so it's not so pink. What I do is I add just a little bit of water to get it going till it's really like flowing. Maybe I added too much water, but then, I can take that and squeeze a little red into it. I think some people just ask, how much water do you use? It's really just until you get this nice viscous consistency that's not feeling too watery. I'd like to add a little bit of white into my color sometimes too, because it makes it more opaque. If you just put a tiny but a white, doesn't lighten it up too much. I always have a big tube of white because I like to use a lot of white. Now I'm just going to go in and start by painting the outline and filling in. Drawing these the same sizes they are in real life, but there's no reason that I can't also make them really big. This one's bigger. One thing I'm doing here is I'm observing the negative space, I don't know what's it called. Just the green part, the stem of the strawberry and painting around it. That gives me a space to paint and later on. You also don't have to do that, you can also just layer the green right on top of the red. Because this is in the graphic style, I'm thinking of each color as its own shape. I'm going to paint each color and each shape one at a time on top of the other. This is a pretty simple object to start with because it's really straightforward. You have the strawberry, you have the green leaves, and then you have in the seeds on top. But you might end up using the style for something more complicated, in which case, you can sketch out lightly in pencil where each color is going to go before. Just for fun, maybe I'll make a couple more strawberries in a slightly different shade of red because this could end up being a pattern where you have different colors of red strawberries all within the same pattern and using those different shades, add some interest to it. Maybe we have ones that are a lighter pink or lighter red. Just moving these around, just like we did the peach as I go to get some different angles that we haven't looked at before. It's going to take a little time for this to dry. You want to make sure that each layer is completely dry before you go on to the next layer, because otherwise it's going to start bleeding together like in our first technique. Right now we don't want that. Now I'm going to show doing a couple in overlap. Without waiting for this red to dry mixing the green, putting the green on, and then going and painting the background. I want to paint both red shapes at once, but at the same time, it might be difficult to envision exactly where I want to keep painting this red because we have this green leaf in between. I'm going to take my pencil and just give myself a rough outline. Really rough because I can figure that out myself as I paint just where this is going to go. Now I know how tall I want that to be. Again, looking at that negative shape of the green, start painting the southern strawberry right behind it. Then that gives me space to add that green in later. It looks like, if you're not sure if your paint is dry, look at it on an angle and you can see how any wet spots pick-up the light. Really I'm just looking to see that the edges are dry, so that in any instance where this next layer I'm painting starts to overlap the red, it's not going to bleeds. I can see most of my pieces at the edges are dry and now I'm going to mix my green. Like I mentioned before, I like to use the places where colors used to be in my palette, just as a guide of where I can start mixing them now. I have this little area that had some green in it. There's not much green left, but I'm just going to put a little water in there and mix it around and get it going. That also gets any little dried bits out and makes a nice surface to mix mint green in, and I this is actually looking pretty good. I might want it to be a little lighter, so I'm going and get my favorite blending green and put that in there to mix it with the existing green. You really need just a little paint, unless you know you're painting a large space with one color, really adapt goes along way. I mix that in. Again, I want it to be a little opaque. I want to mix in something like a white or something that's a little milky. I mentioned that Naples yellow before, that's the creamy yellow. That's going to go into green really well. I still have some on my palette from the Peach. It's dry actually. But just by putting a little of that in, it isn't lightening up our green too much, but it's making it the consistency that I'm after. I have my green and now I'm going to start looking at the leaves. Because it's a more general shape, I can just pick and choose little pieces of these different objects and observe it, but also make it up as I go. I should mention if you're unsure of your colors before you get started, you can always take a scrap piece of paper, or even if you're working in your sketch book and you don't mind it being refer scratch work surface, you can always watch the colors in here.That's no big deal, but you can also just take another piece of paper and see how they go together beforehand. Do I like this lime green? I guess it's fine. It is lighter than the green on the actual strawberries, but that's okay. Now that I did this, maybe I do want it to be a little darker. In order to make it darker, I might just dot a tiny blue in there. There's a lot of ways you could go about it. You could just take some darker green out of the tube. But I'm just going to take a really tiny amount of blue filling [inaudible] right now and mix it in with my green, and that made a difference. I'm just going to go pretty loose with this. Even though we're calling this the graphic method, that doesn't mean you necessarily need to get hung up on accuracy or making it look too naturalistic, but you should feel free to paint within your own style and as much in detail or as not as you prefer. Even though I did leave some white spaces here for the leaves, I still decided to paint over the red because you can layer and you can do that if you want, doing this pretty quickly. Now I'm going to go back to this layered one we did earlier. I can see exactly where this green was supposed to go. Then our last step is going to be the little dots on top and they are yellowish. Maybe they're yellow green. But I'm just going to use my own personal preference for that. I'm going to go back to my Naples yellow because I know it's nice and opaque and it's going to layer on top of that red really well. You don't have to stick to the colors that you see at all. You could make these dots black if you want your drawing to be very stylized and graphic. It's up to you and it's also worth trying out different color options that might be unexpected because that's another way that you can find your style. I'm also going to simplify because there's so many of those dots that I feel like if I put all of them in, it's going to be really overwhelming to my drawing and end up not even looking that realistic. I'm not even really looking at the stagger anymore because I'm just concentrating on how it's going to look on the page. This is pretty similar to the peach where maybe you do one and you think that colors not quite right, and that's okay, so just do it again. I'm doing this now and I'm thinking it looks a little greenish, it looks a little too close to that stem color, even though it clearly is lighter because it didn't mix with the little green. I think I'm just going to wash my brush off and use the actual yellow just right out of the tube. Sometimes I'll like put my brush right into the tube, but I still tend to mix at least a little of water in because otherwise it can be really dry and hard to apply. This is a pretty simple one to start out with because we keep saying this, it's only three elements. But you can use this same technique with more complicated objects, or people, or scenes and see how that changes the style. The most important thing to keep in mind when doing this exercise is to keep your colors separate and make sure each layer dries in between and have fun. 6. Technique III: Linework: This next exercise, we're focusing on linework. I may use this technique for something I want to give more detail or character to like, a person's face or a plant with complicated leaves. A lot of times people expect line drawings to be done in a pen or a pencil or ink or something that is traditionally used just to make lines but there's no reason that you can't do it in a brush as well. What's great about gouache is you can use it with your brush to make these lines or you can use it for any of the other techniques we've already been over. When you're beginning your line drawing, you should observe the object very closely, paying attention at any areas where the outline curves or dips. Everything you observe will give your drawing more character, so don't be afraid to even add the moments that might seem strange or unexpected. For this technique, we're going to use this lumpy pear here and we chose this just because of how lumpy it is, how interesting the shape is. It gives our eye a lot to look over and a lot to translate onto the paper. There are a few different ways that we could approach drawing this pair in linework and it just depends on what colors we want to use and where we want to put them. For the first one, I think I'll just do an outline of the pear in that nice lime green and then the stem in brown. I'm just going to go back to the linden green and Naples yellow again. I think there's a lot of ways of applying this technique, they are slightly different but they all focus on the outline. I'm really trying to spend more time looking at the pear than I am looking at my paper. The nice thing about this brush is, as you press it, you can get it to go from thick to thin. I can do a test right here, where I like pressing down all the way, it's really thick and then just like easing up. So, that's a nice way of, even like these little breaks in the line can show different moments of this pear as we're going along here. You can even go into the inside and maybe like put a little dip in there, something like that. Similar to the graphic layering, I want to put the stem on here in brown but I'm going to let this green dry first because otherwise, if I just go right in there with the brown, it's going to bleed everywhere and I don't want that to happen. Instead, I'm going to start a second drawing. For this one, I know I want there to be an outline around it but I'm going to blend a little bit of this graphic shape by first doing just a really rough inside of this pear. I'm just adding a little water to get my paint to stretch further and then when that dries, I'm going to go on top of it with some line work. I'm not spending a whole lot of time pausing in between because these are exercises and I'm just trying to learn and get things down and I'm also a little impatient, while one thing is drying, I'm just going right to the next one. For this next one, I'm just going to ignore the color of the pear. It's green and brown but let's do it in this nice dark purple that we had squeezed out earlier, that's still wet. It's kind of funny, almost doesn't even look like a pear, that's cool. Now, I mixed up this brown just by using some of the colors on the palette that were still wet because I knew that I had the colors to make brown. The purple is dark enough to get this to a darker point, I didn't even leave myself enough space here but that's okay. I'm going to go back here, you see, I didn't really quite wait long enough but that's okay. I'm going to go back with the same purple and give this an outline, maybe not paying too much attention to this shape that I made underneath. To really highlight the differences between these styles, I think I'm going to bring the strawberries back into this one and show how they look in linework. That'll make our line pear look a little less lonely too. This is a really good way to get to know your brush too if it's new to you because this gives you a chance to see everything it's capable of, to use the fine point and then also, lean more on the side of it and see how heavy it can get. I don't like the little dots in there, they don't quite have the the weight that these ones do but maybe if I did the same thing I did here, where I painted the interior and then put an outline on top, it might feel better. This was our linework, I think it's a really great place to start if you're interested in observing the world and seeing how it influences your work. Not only that but this technique forces you to pay close attention to your object and show what makes it unique. Now that we've run through all these techniques, let's bring them together into one still-life. 7. Exercise: Still-life: Now that we've learned these three techniques, let's bring it all together into a single Still-life. Go ahead and choose 4-6 pieces of fruit, or if you don't have fruit, you can collect objects from around your house and lay it out into a still-life to draw from. I'd limit your palate to three or four colors to keep it cohesive. Let's try to use all three styles we just went over throughout. For my still-life, I'm going to try to use each one at least twice. If you found a style that you feel particularly drawn to you though, feel free to use it throughout. For my still life, I brought back the pear and the strawberries to draw, and I also added in some bananas and plum. So looking at the still-life, I set up, I know that I don't want to use too many colors for this, but because we're still drawing our fruit, and again, you can also draw anything you have around your house. The pallet is already pretty limited. I can see purple, red, yellow, and a very yellow green. The bananas and the pair are actually almost the same color. If you're having a hard time deciding on colors, a good trick is to squint your eyes and seeing what jumps out to you. I'm going to start somewhere on the side, and that'll give me a good sense of the scale I'm working with and how the other elements will fit in from there. But you can also start wherever seems to make the most sense or feels comfortable. I think maybe in the foreground working backwards seems to be the most logical. I also have to decide because I'm trying to use all three styles, wet on wet, graphic and line work into one drawing. What's going to be what? I want it to end up feeling pretty balanced and feel like it makes sense even though we're using these three very different styles. I want to focus on keeping them evenly interspersed so nothing ends up feeling out of place. I'm looking at each object and sizing it up and saying, would that work well as a line, would that work better if it was more graphic? But I think when it comes down to it, I might have to just start. I have a lot of strawberries here, so I might try to draw all the strawberries a slightly different way and see what happens. Maybe I'll just start with a line right here and make that side-by-side something that looks completely different. Again, when I'm doing this wet on wet, I'm just observing how the object is sitting in space, which part is in the highlight or which part is in the light and which part is darker, so I take the main color, which is that yellow, and I mix in something that's just going to make it a little muddy, appear like it's an a shadow. For that I took a little bit of the purple and put that in the yellow because yellow and purple are complimentary, just a tiny bit so that it's not overpowering, and that makes the area that I painted on recede a little bit. As I'm drawing the plum, looking at the actual object, it is really pretty plain. It almost is a black ball. The purple is really black. But I'm going to use my imagination and I'm going to mix a brighter purple, and I'm going to mix in a little bit of red and paint this loose abstract plum the way I want it to be rather than the way it is in real life. I really just made all these stylistic decisions as I went without thinking too much about it. Just keeping in mind, I wanted to do something a little bit different on every piece. It seems like it worked all right, so far. It's nice to have, especially the line is, I think the most different from the other two because it's not so solid, so just to make sure that that's here in the middle and on the end ties the whole thing together. Looking back at this now, I just did this so quickly, so just kind of spur the moment, paying attention to my style and the colors I was using that a lot of my scale isn't accurate, the bananas are much smaller than they are in real life. The strawberries taking more space. The pear is right in the center, being overpowering, but doesn't really seem to matter. It's the drawing in your sketch book. It's not reality. But for the most part, I'm happy with how this turned out now. 8. Maintaining Your Materials: Now that we're done painting for the day, let's talk about a couple of tips to help maintain your materials. It's really pretty simple, all I do is dump out the water. I like to take my paper towel and maybe set it aside, and use it again later because it's still good. Palette can either wash it or not wash it as we've discussed. The brushes are the most important thing that you want to keep clean because if you use a nice brush like I do, I want to continue to use it for awhile. So I'll just take it in the sink, put a little soap in the palm of my hand, swish it around with some water like your shampooing it, rinse it and you're good to go. I always notice a lot of people have pretty bad habits with their brushes and it drives me a little bit crazy, like leaving it in the water like this, for a really long time or maybe leaving it out with paint on it, and then the paint just dries. Gouache, you can wash off, but that's not good for maintaining your brush long-term. So, I just always make sure I rinse it at the end, maybe go clean it properly in the sink. That's all you need to do. 9. Final Thoughts: If there's one thing I want you to take away it's that gouache is, a really versatile, fun medium that you can take in any direction you'd like. We've covered how to use gouache wet on wet, more like watercolor. We used it more graphic and opaque and bold, and we experimented with some line work, and if you've been following along, you now have a few pages of drawings and a whole still-life under your belt. If you've been creating your own work along the way, we'd love to see your pieces in the project gallery. I'd love to see what fruit you chose or what's still lives you put together with your own objects. Or if you've just been drawing or sketching in other mediums, please upload those as well. Thanks for taking the class today and I can't wait to see what you guys created. 10. What to Watch Next: [inaudible]