Easy Landscape in GOUACHE

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm Sandra and Curtis and I'll be your teacher today. I've been playing with gouache and acrylic gouache for a while now and I thought I'd share with you what I've learned so far, as well as a few tips and techniques. This new series is all about landscapes. I've always been intimidated with landscape paintings until tried painting them with gouache. And I was able to break down the process in several easy steps, which made it a lot less frightening for me and a lot more enjoyable. So in this first class, we'll learn about the difference between regular gouache and acrylic wash. And you'll learn how to apply different mixes on the paper, as well as how to paint gradients, which will help you for your final project. Once you're done with practicing, it will be time to tackle the first landscape. I chose a very simple reference photo that you can easily sketch on your paper or your watercolor journal. Then you'll apply the paint one step at a time using the same technique as during your practice exercise. You'll repeat the process several times until you end up with a beautiful finished painting. I hope you'll join me in this class where you can follow the easy step-by-step instructions to paint an easy and colorful landscape at your very own pace. You can share your progress along the way and ask any questions. I'll see you in class. 2. Supplies: For this project, you're going to need a pencil or a mechanical pencil with an eraser can be any kind of eraser. I'm used to using a kneaded eraser, but you can use whatever you want. That will be to sketch your landscape. Brushes. We're only going to use a small flat and a small round. This you can even get away with it. A watercolor or mixed media sketchbook. This one is a handbook journal. As long as your paper is thick, I would recommend at least 140 pounds or you don't have to use a journal, you can just use a piece of paper from a pad. It's up to you. I do not want to do it too big because we're just practicing. And the bigger the painting, the harder it's going to be to work on the gradient. So I made a small painting and it's five by 7 ". I wouldn't go any bigger than this to start with this and it's totally optional. Some painters tape, artist's tape, whatever it's called, or washy tape that you're going to use to frame your painting. In other words, once you've measured the space of your painting, you can put the tape around it. And that way you can paint and even go a little bit over the tape. And once you're painting is all dry, you can remove the tape and have nice crisp borders. Again, that's totally optional. It's up to you now afford the paint. You have several options. You can use regular gouache and you've got plenty of different brands you can use. The easiest one to find a little bit everywhere is the Winsor and Newton. You can get the M Graham, the da Vinci. There's a main memory as well. If you've been following the jelly cup craze, you could even use some hemi gouache. I'll be using acrylic gouache, which are very similar to gouache. And in the next video, I'll explain to you the difference between the two. So you really have a variety of paint you can use. And if you do not have any gouache at all, you can always use acrylic. And I would recommend some heavy body because it's, it'll be easier to get the same effect as gouache. It's thicker and it's a bit more opaque as well. You can choose whatever brand you have. To pick the colors. I used my swatch book where I have all my paint colors. And I'm gonna be using a strong orange, John Brilliant mixing white, ultramarine and burnt umber. So I realized that not everybody might have these two colors is to oranges because they're more like convenience colors already mixed. But let's see if we can make some colors to get as close as possible to these two. For this, we're going to need a mixing palette. And we actually going to need that for our project to mix our colors together. But I like to use are ceramic tiles that you can buy the hardware store for very cheap, $1 or less. I've got all sorts of different sizes. This is just gonna be my sample, so I'm going to use a small one. But I use a bigger one for my painting. So first our strong orange. John, Brilliant. This is very orange. It's a little transparent, and this is a lot more opaque. It's more like a flesh color. I think that we can achieve this color with maybe the permanent yellow deep and the spectrum read from Winsor Newton. Let's, let's try to use just a little bit of the red. So this is a similar color. I think that could work. You should. I think it will work pretty, pretty well. Maybe with adding a little bit of white. Let's try very little. So I've got some zinc white. She's a mixing white. I think by mixing the right quantity of those three colors, we can achieve a very similar color. We're going to wait till they all dry because there's always a color shift. And in the meantime, we're going to see what we can mix to get this. So like I mentioned earlier, this is very much like a flesh color and some brands have actual flesh tones. So we've got named Mary here that has a flesh tint, Winsor and Newton has a flesh tint as well. So this with a hint of yellow, might actually get the yellow from here. Maybe I'll mix mix it with this mix. It looks like it might work well. Very similar. With a bit of weight, might be closer, maybe a different read. Other than that, we could try the mix also that we did for this orange with Naples yellow. Maybe it was more white. I think we're getting somewhere. My advice if you don't have all those colors, is to make a color chart of the colors you have. Here. I've got all my Winsor and Newton colors and see what you could mix to get something similar to the color you need. And don't hesitate to take a piece of scrap paper and test it out. 3. Gouache VS. Acrylic Gouache: There's basically one major difference between regular gouache and acrylic wash. Use them both the same way, but with regular gouache. Once it's dry, you can actually reactivate it just like watercolor and acrylic gouache. You can't just like with acrylic. So let's do a few swatches so you can see the difference. And we starting with some Windsor and Newton ultramarine, It's very creamy and semi-transparent. And when you add water to the mix, you'll see that it dilutes very well, just like watercolor and you can actually use it like watercolors. The second swatch is ultramarine acrylic wash by Turner. And the paint is a little thicker and a little bit more opaque. But really the results will vary depending on the brands, some brands of gouache or a little bit more opaque than others. Some dilute better, some spread better with water. And it will depend also on the paper that you use. So here, just like with regular gouache, acrylic wash can spread very nicely with water. That said, it tends to dry pretty fast. And once you add a little bit of water to the end of it, you can see that it's already a little bit dry and does not spread as easily as the gouache. So you basically have to work very fast if you want to do special effects with the acrylic wash. Now just for the heck of it, I'm using a second tube of gouache, which is by Holbein, and it's another ultramarine blue. And this one seems a little bit more opaque right out of the tube. The Winsor and Newton spreads very nicely with water, just like the Winsor and Newton. So to say to dry everything with a hairdryer just to do more testing. As you can see, the regular gouache reactivates with water very easily. You can even lift the paint with a paper towel, just wet the area you want to lift and then apply a paper towel on top and you can remove the excess paint. Now, depending on the colors you use, some pigments are more staining than others. So you might get back to the white of the paper or very close. With the second wash swatch, I get the exact same result. I'm sorry, I must apologize for the blurry picture. My camera has a touch screen and I think I might have changed some settings by accident. And so parts of this video are a little bit blurry, but luckily I caught it and I was able to fix this later on. Now for the acrylic gouache, you'll see that it barely wet. Only a literal stain on the paper. That's all. And you definitely cannot lift it. Now I'm going back to the regular gouache swatches and you'll see that even the diluted paint is about to reactivate with water, but not for the acrylic wash. Now let's do another swatch with regular acrylic. You can essentially applied the same way, although to me it looks a little bit more transparent and doesn't feel as creamy. But you can also spread it with water and do nice light washes, just like watercolors. And once it's dry, this does not reactivate at all. It's totally waterproof and it has a shiny, especially when you apply a load of paint. The gouache and acrylic gouache dry with a matte finish. Now let's see how we can apply the gouache with different dilutions and what effects you'll get. So with the first wash, you use a lot of water, you dilute it so that you can make it look like watercolor. So there's only a little bit of pigment and a lot of water, and it's basically colored water. For the second watch, we add a bit more water and we tried to give it more of milk consistency. So it's still pretty liquid but more opaque. You can't really see the white of the palate through it. So you see that on the paper it's already a lot darker. The third wash will have the consistency of heavy cream. So you add more paint to your wash and you can actually push it on the palate and see the white underneath, but it's thick enough that you can push it around. The very last wash is the paint right out of the tube with no water in it. And it's yet a little darker. But you brush load one, go as far because you brush will dry out much faster and you'll have some dry brush effects. Now it's time to practice our gradients for our final project. But first, we're going to put some. Washi tape or painter's tape on the paper to create a few rectangles where we'll paint are several gradients. What I like to do with the tape to make sure it's not too sticky enters the paper once you remove it, is to either tip it to my clothes and remove it so that it removes a little bit of the tetanus. But I do have cats and whenever I do that, I often have some cat hairs stuck to it and I don't like it. So instead, I stick it to the inside of my hand and if the tape is long enough, it might go up my arm as well. I found that this technique works pretty well. I'm going to use the same colors I'll be using for the painting. So for the first gradient, I use some strong orange, John, Brilliant and mixing white. If you don't have those colors, remember that you can use your own mix like we did in the previous lesson. So the first wash will be pretty thick. It'll be just like the heavy cream. I know it doesn't look much like hit with this paint. That's because for some reason this particular color is very grainy. It's from a special set. I'm not sure why they make it with, but it's pretty grainy. But anyway, if you using regular gouache tried to make this wash with a heavy cream dilution. The goal for this first landscape is to basically do something quick and easy. So we're not going to do too many layers and we're not going to start with a very diluted layer. We're going to go straight with a pretty thick layer of gouache. So you're going to work up the paper adding lighter and lighter colors. First you start with your darker orange. Then you'll add a little bit of the lighter orange to the darker orange, then you'll do the lighter orange by itself. Then the lighter orange mixed with the white. Before the paint dries, you can go back and forth with your brush to blend in-between colors so that you have a nice and smooth gradient. If you took too long in the paint starts to dry, That's okay because you can paint over it. You new layer will not blend with the colors underneath because it's acrylic wash. At the end of this video, we'll do another gradient with regular gouache, and I'll show you how to deal with that. So you just work back and forth up and down until you have the colors that you want. I wanted the bottom to be nice and bright orange and the top to be a lot lighter. So I'm happy with it now and I'll go to the next wash. So now we're going to work on the next two gradients and they're not sky is, there will be two of the mountain ranges, some using an ultramarine blue, but you'll see that on the reference photo, it's not bright blue and the landscape is pretty hazy. So I'm mixing that John Brilliant with the ultramarine blue to make it look more easy. For the first blue gradient, I realized that I made my blue to dark. So it'll be for the middle ground mountain and the bottom gradient will be further background Mountain, which is supposed to be lighter. The further away from you an object is, the lighter it is. Hi. So work back-and-forth, top gradient and bottom gradient. I made the blue bit darker for the top gradient. And the bottom part of the gradient needs to be a lot lighter and more orange because of the missed on the reference photo. So just like with the very first gradient we did with the oranges, I work up and down back and forth until I'm happy with the colors that I've got. There's two gradients might look muddy for now, but that's kinda what it looks like while it's drying because some parts of it are drying, some are still wet. So it doesn't look even but it doesn't worry me because I know there's a color shift when the paint dries. Usually the dark colors end up being lighter and lighter colors and the pink a bit darker. Once I'm happy, I let it dry and I'm going to show you the shift of colors. Now that my swatches are dry, I'm going to re-wet my Winsor and Newton gouache and paint a swatch next to the dry swatch. Just like with watercolors. You'll see that while the paint is wet, it's nice and vibrant and shiny. And once it dries and the water has evaporated, the gouache is Matt and intensity and their shade of the color has shifted a little bit. You also saw that I was able to re-wet that Gouache very easily in the palette. Now, let's see what the acrylic gouache does. It obviously doesn't really work very well. And you can see that there are a lot of solid little pieces coming off. It's just basically the same as acrylic. Acrylic will do the same. Neither are gradients are nice and dry. Let's remove the tape. Just be careful so that you don't tear your paper. If you want, you can use a hairdryer to warm up your tape and make it easier to remove without damaging your paper. So like I said, the top wash is this guy. The middle one is the middle ground mountains and the bottom one is the background mountains. I think that turned out pretty nicely and they look hazy like they're supposed to, and the sky is nice and bright. Finally, we'll do another gradient, but this time using regular gouache rather than acrylic wash. And I do not have quite the same colors, so I'm using something slightly different. I'll be using cadmium yellow, orange, John Brilliant number two, which is a little darker than the one I use with acrylic wash. And the zinc white, which is very similar to a mixing white. I'm going to paint in the exact same order, making a nice heavy cream wash with a darker orange. Then mixing it with the lighter orange for my second pass. And I'm blending it with the darker orange. Then I'm getting lighter and lighter all the way up. So you could be blending each color with one another. But the nice thing with gouache is that it doesn't dry as fast and again, it doesn't dry permanent. So what you can do to blend all these colors evenly. Is clean up your brush and with a damp brush, go over your gradient and even it out. And then you can adjust the colors as you wish. Gouache colors tend to shift a lot more when they dried and acrylic wash. And so when I dried this gradient, I realized that there was not a very big difference between the bottom and the top. So now that the paint is nice and dry, I decided to add another layer if I'm careful and don't blend too much, it's not going to be wet the bottom layer very much. But since I'm working on a gradient, I won't mind. And it might actually be to my advantage that it really wet so that I have a nice and smooth transition between all the colors. So I added a lighter color on the top, and before added more orange, I decided to blend my lighter color with the first layer underneath, so I clean my brush and with a damp brush, I lightly reactivate the paint underneath. This is a technique that works very well. Once I was satisfied with this gradient, I dried it with a hairdryer again to see what the final clothes would be. And I already liked it much better, but I decided to try and add a third layer to it and have a nicer contrast between the top and the bottom of the gradient. So basically we applied the same colors in the same places. My goal right now is to have the top of the sky a lot lighter. And this can be tricky because it most likely will blend a little bit with the orange underneath when you use acrylic gouache and your first layer is all dry, then whatever you add on top of it, well, not blend with what's underneath. Once I was happy with all the colors, I've dried the paint again and this time I really liked it. So since the paint is dry, I remove the tape and I was really happy with the result. Now with regular gouache, you have to be careful because the paint that's on the tape might flake off as you remove it. Make sure that you don't run your painting by squishing it on your paper while you remove your tape. Try to brush it off at the same time so that you keep a nice and clean paper. Alright, so now it's time to practice your gradients. Feel free to practice with all different colors. Anything you like. The more you practice, the more comfortable you will be, and the smoother your gradients will be. And once you're done, you're ready to start working on your project. 4. Sketch: For the line drawing, you can either trace the picture or you can try to sketch it straight on your paper. This picture is pretty simple and you get to keep in mind that you don't need to be perfect. You don't need to have all the lines exactly where they are is just a landscape. You only have to give the impression of mountains and a horizon line for the water. So it's pretty simple. Now if you want to try to make it as close as possible, It's fairly easy. And the way I usually do it is by trying to measure roughly where some lines are located compared to the middle of the page, or three-quarters of a page, either horizontally or vertically. Sometimes I'll make little marks on the sides to tell me where half of the page is or a quarter of the pages. I started with the mountain in the middle ground because it's slightly over half of the page. So if you draw an invisible line horizontally halfway down the page, the left of the middle ground mountains starts right above that line. It's lens down towards the right with a little bump. And if you draw an invisible line vertically halfway through the page, you'll see that that bump slightly to the right of that middle and then it goes down and on the right side of the paper it ends up being slightly under the middle line. The line between the water and the mountain in the foreground is about a quarter of the way up. And this is not quite straight because you'll see that almost halfway through is a literal indent. It goes up and then it goes straight across. So that's this little details that you can keep an eye on to try to make sketches more accurate. On the left side, the foreground mountain starts almost halfway between the waterline and the middle ground mountain. It's slightly under the halfway mark, but there's something that I need to keep in mind is that my format is not quite the same as the format of the photo, so I need to modify it a little bit and you can do it too if you need to make it fit within your own format. So I follow the line of went down a bit down the mountain, I did the tree line. You can see it's a treeline because it's not a smooth line. It has some little peaks here and there, and then it goes up a little bit on the right side. And then finally the background mountain. Again, I made it a little bit higher on my page and on the reference photo just because the format of my drawing is a little bit different, that line is a little bit more complicated because this mountain has a lot of peaks. But if you draw an imaginary line going through the top of the tallest peak, you can kind of compare all the peaks with each other so that you know, more or less where they go if they're taller or if they look lower on the page. And you can also compare it with the other mountains you've already drawn, especially the middle ground mountain. So for this sketch, you basically needed to draw three lines. Again, they don't have to be perfect, they don't have to be absolutely accurate. In fact, you can paint them whichever way you like. You can make your own landscape based on this reference photo. 5. Sky: Don't worry, a few sketches, a little messy. You can erase the extra lines if you want to put gouache is opaque and you will not see the lines underneath. For the sky, I'm only using three colors, the strong orange, the Jordan brilliant, and the mixing white. For my first layer, I'm mixing the two oranges together because I do not want my darkest dark to be too dark. And also so that I get a nice even wash. I'm mixing those colors with a palette knife rather than the brush because I don't want the color to be streaky, have a color residues on my brush. I could very well clean the brush once I'm done doing my mixes, but it would be wasting my paint. So I'm using a palette knife instead. I'm also making another mix of the John Brilliant in the mixing white to make a paler orange for the top part of the sky. I'm using my darker mix for the bottom part of this guy, where it's darker orange and I don't really pay too much attention to the line. It's okay if I go over it, because since gouache is opaque, I can always go back on top of it when I paint the peaks of the Mountains. So right away my mixes are pretty thick already and I tried to keep some water on my brush but not too much. Once a darker orange is applied, then I go with the plane, John, Brilliant. I don't want it to be too light, so I just go with color right under the tube and I tried to spread it very nicely and blend it with the bottom layer. Then for the third half of the sky, the top part, when I'm using the mixture with the white because it's a lot lighter. So again, I tried to use enough water so that the paint spreads nicely, but not too much because I'm trying to keep it nice and opaque. And I keep on doing those back-and-forth strokes to make sure that everything is blended smoothly. Once that lighter wash is applied, I use the medium color again to make sure that the transition is nice and smooth. And then the darker color again to, again blend to have another smooth transition. And I go back and forth between those three colors to make sure that I have a very smooth sky. I also noticed that there are a few darker streaks and this guy, maybe some clouds far away in the background. So I decided to add those, but it's really up to you. You can just have a smooth gradation or at those clouds 6. Water: I'm going to let the paint for the sky dry on its own. And in the meantime, I'm going to use the exact same colors for the water, except that it looks a bit lighter than this guy. So I'm going to add more white to the mixtures. It also looks a little bit more yellow, but I did not want to add too many colours to our palette. So we're going to keep the mixes already have and just add white. Now when you're blocking the water, it doesn't matter if you mix is not 100% well-mixed. You can see that there are some darker lines, lighter lines that shows the little waves, the little caps on the water. So if your paint is not mixed properly, as long as you go back and forth horizontally, it will already start giving the impression of waves because you have your white paint in your orange paint, not mixed entirely. Again, I want an opaque layers so I'm not adding very much water just enough to spread the paint. If for some reason you think your paint is too dry on your paper, you haven't added enough water on your brush. You can always dip your paintbrush in water just a little bit and smooth out your wash. It'll blend the paint together. Now once you're happy with your wash, it's time to work more on those waves. And it's a very simple process. Just add a darker mix of your orange on your brush and just make some little uneven lines on your wash. Try to have some that are a bit darker and some that are a bit lighter, but don't go overboard, don't add too many. 7. Background Mountains: Before I continue with my painting, made sure that the sky was tribe because some of the paint will stick out into the skies. And when I reshape my mountain and I wanted to make sure that the paint was dry so that it wouldn't mix together with the sky. You can speed up the process with a hairdryer if you want to. I decided to just take a break and go do something else instead. But when I came back, my paint was drying on my palette. And when I tried to mix it together, I realized it was just not fresh at all and had little pieces coming off the palette. So I decided to take some new paint from the tubes. We're using regular gouache. This wouldn't happen because I could have added a little bit of water. It would have reactivated the paint and I could have kept on going with the paint that was dry. This is not the case for the acrylic gouache. Once it's dry, you cannot reuse it at all, just like regular acrylic paint. So when you look at those three ranges of mountains, you can see that they're basically the same blue, but different shades, meaning that I use the same color and ultramarine blue for all three of them, but I added more or less of the orange to it so that I could have a nice gradient. Again, my goal is to keep a small palette of colors. They are in harmony. And again, I use the lesion brilliant that I mixed with my ultramarine blue. And I put quite a lot of orange this time because it's the mountains all the way in the background. So they're not as visible, not as defined as the ones in the foreground. Or you can actually see the color is much better. Plus it looks like the weather is pretty hazy, so we'll have to take that into consideration. So the way I see it is the top of the mountains are a little bit darker than the bottom part that's hiding behind the middle ground mountains. So we'll, we'll have to do another gradients right there. So I'm applying my first mix to the whole strip of mountain in the background. And I'm trying to redefine my peaks while observing the reference photo. Again, I'm not trying to make it perfect. Everybody can see it's a mountain range, so it's okay. And I know that every time I'm going to add more paint to it and probably going to slightly modified the shape of those mountains, but I'm not too concerned about it. Then I use a mix with more orange in it. And I focus on the lower part of those mountains. So like with this guy, I'm going to go back and forth with that top half and bottom half, adding either some of the mixed with more blue or some of the mixed with more orange and trying to blend it nicely to make a nice gradation. At some point I use some pure orange for the bottom just to make sure that it stands out more than with the mix. Because as we've already talked about, sometimes there is a shift in colors once the paint dries and I wanted to make sure that the bottom part of those mountains or significantly lighter than the top part. So keep on playing back and forth with the paint until you're satisfied with the gradient. And do keep in mind that it's going to dry a little bit lighter. 8. Middle Ground Mountains: This time I use a hairdryer to dry the previous layer because I know it's going to have to paint over the bottom part of it. And I wanted to make sure that it was entirely dry. And then I used basically the same color again as for the background mountains, except that I used less orange in my mix. Those mountains are a little bit bluer. They are a little bit darker because they are closer to us, slightly more defined. So I painted the top half with the Bluemix and then the bottom half, the same mix with a little bit of orange in it. Once more, I worked back and forth with a darker blue. And then the more orange blue to try and blend them together to have a nice gradient. Sometimes when you use acrylic gouache, since it dries pretty fast, if you use a thicker layer with enough water, it's not going to dry as fast and you'll be able to blend those two colors together a bit easier. 9. Foreground Mountains: Now it's time for the foreground mountains. This is the easiest layer of all because it's nice and smooth. There is no gradient at all. So I'm not going to lighten my blue. I actually need to darken it. It's a blue that's darker than an ultramarine blue. And I'm not going to add some black to it because it's going to flatten the color a little bit. Instead, I decided to add some burnt umber, and I also added a tiny bit of orange just to unify all those three ranges of mountains. I'm redefining again the shape of this mountain range and adding a nice and opaque layer of the paint. I used a brown brush to add the little details with the trees. Just a little peaks of paint sticking out, just enough to give an impression. Now I must say I had a hard time making a straight line with the paint on the left part of those mountains. If I was not recording a video, would have moved my paper and paint it vertically. So then I would have had a much better straight line. And so feel free to do that if you want to. You can see also there the literal indent. And I mentioned to you when we were sketching and make sure that I show it. I made it a little bit more pronounced than on the reference photo, but doesn't matter. It's my painting. It's okay if I don't make it exactly the same way as on the photo. Now you see that within that indent on the water, there is a shadow. It's a lighter blue, almost like the mountains in the background. So I use a mix of blue and orange again, to paint that shadow on the water. It could very well skipped that shadow if you wanted to, It's up to you. I decided to paint it just to show you. And now also notice that when the water was dry, the lines that I had painted for the waves kind of lighten up a little bit. So I touched it up real quick again with some orange paint. 10. Final Toughts: So that's it. We're done with our first landscape class. It's time to remove the tape around the painting. If your tape is not very tacky, you can carefully remove it. But if you're afraid to damage the paper around your painting, a great way to avoid doing it is to use a hairdryer. So you can either apply the heat as you're removing the tape, or you can apply the heat first for each piece of tape, then remove it, then apply the heat again on the second piece of tape. Remove it until you're done. And now you have nice and crisp edges around your landscape. So I hope you've enjoyed learning about gouache and the difference with the acrylic gouache. Both mediums are a lot of fun and I really like both of them equally. If you have any troubles with anything, please let me know and ask any questions you want. I'm here to help you. And don't hesitate to share your practice gradients in your final project for the class. Thank you all very much for joining me today. I'll see you soon with another easy landscape painting class. Bye-bye.