Transcripts
1. Intro: Welcome to my introduction to guage course. This class is all about getting started with Bosch and learning some basic techniques that will help you when you begin painting landscapes. Washes portable and incredibly versatile. So it's great for anything from travel sketches to illustration work or detailed landscape paintings you want to hang on the wall. I'll share a variety of methods for improving your color mixing some basic skills and demonstrate two of the most popular painting techniques, diluted wash versus the wash. Guage can be really tricky at first. So I'll share lots of tips along the way. And I'll also provide free printable mixing charts and reference photos to get you started. You'll also be able to download my beginner's guide to wash PDF, which is packed full of helpful information. Guassian is more than just opaque watercolor and together we'll discover its unique properties. So grab your sketchbooks and let's start the journey.
2. Supplies: I have a few different setups for Miguasha, and I'll show you my different ways of painting with it throughout the demos. But for now, let's just quickly talk about some of my favorite supplies that make my life much easier. Don't forget to download my complete beginners guide to goulash PDF because that's got tons of information about supplies. This is a watercolor palette box. You can find them for pretty cheap, and there's a bunch of different brands. When you open it up, you'll see that there is a silicon, I guess just a seal was what they call it. And it has little indents where each of these raised edges are. So basically what that shows you is that each one of these is airtight in itself. When you look at the wells, you can see that this area is a little bit shorter than this area over here. So the clip underneath actually sits up inside of it. And this is allows you to hold it when you're outside. So you just slide your finger in there and you can hold it a little bit easier. However, I usually just set it down somewhere. So these wells are very deep and you can see how much paint I have in them. It kind of varies and I'm constantly refilling them. I'm actually changing my colors all the time. I used to have way more colors, which you're going to see in some of the demo videos. But either way, it holds 24 colors, which is plenty. I prefer to work from a limited palette. That's just my own preference. To keep the gloss from drying out. I use a water bottle, which is just a little spritz bottle. And all I do is during the session. I'll also spritz my palette where I'm mixing my color once in a while because gosh does tend to dry out quickly. But here's a little tip. If you tilt the guage and you see it reflecting light, you can see how shiny it is. If it's shiny, it doesn't need to be sprayed. It's okay. If you notice that any of the colors are starting to look a little bit Matt, you need a spritz it because that means it's drying out. You don't want that top layer to dry out. Another very common way of painting with Wash, which I also do all the time is I usually just a lid for my watercolor palette and I'll just put little drops, little piles of pain and I'll take I'll mix from those piles of pain. So instead of using this whole box, I'll just have like four colors or something on my palate. If you get one of these boxes and it's not quite as airtight as you had hoped. What I did and I don't really need to do this, but I did it anyway. I made a little piece of paper with my swatches of what's inside. These are in the wrong spot. Don't ask. And then when I put this on top and I press it down, it makes it much harder to close it. But it makes it like over 100% airtight like this is not going anywhere. You guys there's no air getting into those wells. I can throw this around in my bag and nothing happens, doesn't spill. So if you want to tighten it just a little, add a piece of watercolor paper. You can add swatches like I did, which just makes it helpful. Also, just a quick note, they come with these little things which I believe are to scoop the paint out or maybe grab some paint and then mix it on a palette. I used it when I cleaned out my entire palette and it was kind of helpful, but You know, it's not necessary. For the most part when I'm painting, I'm actually using a palette knife. So I will scoop the paint out of my palette box, put it onto my mixing tray, and then use my brush or the, or the palette knife to mix whatever color I need. Which again, I'll show you in the demos. My favorite guage brushes or my favorite way to paint with goulash is to use flat brushes. The reason for that is because flat brushes hold much less water than the big round brushes. So if we look at these big round brushes, we can see this body. This is where all the water is stored and the pain usually sits at the tip of that. Flat brushes don't have that. You see how thin that is. It means that this is going to hold way less water than this. And that, as you'll get to know, goulash is very finicky when it comes to water, and there are different ways of using it. But if you want to be a little bit more in control of how much water you have in your mix. I recommend starting out with flat brushes because it makes water control much easier. Now you may have noticed that there were a couple of colors missing from my box. This quinacridone, magenta and my white colors, or for instance, with zinc way in permanent way, which are the two whites that I use. Because I prefer to put these directly on my mixing tray so I can use fresh white paint every single time. And this one in particular gets a little bit stinky when it's kept in my box for a long period of time. Otherwise, I have absolutely no issues with these colors and they're all good for long-term storage and keep everything sealed in a bag like this. But either way, just make sure that all of your lens are on very, very tightly when you're not using them because you don't want any air to get in there and dry them out. Actually had that happen to some of my older my Holbein tubes, which was a really upsetting thing. Currently my favorite type of sketch book to use for Guassian is the CEO of Brighton watercolor journal. It's a slightly textured, cold pressed paper. And it's not as textured is like arches or some of the other papers, but it does have a little bit of a tooth to it and it's not quite as absorbent, which is the reason I like it for guage. So you can see up close, I'm able to get some really lovely dry brush textures. However, when I want to, I can get a really smooth, crisp fill of a color in it doesn't have any texture showing through. So I just find this paper to be really versatile. I know it's not available everywhere. So you're just gonna have to experiment with which watercolor sketch books and you can find. I also would recommend the mole skin watercolor sketch books because they are a little bit smoother and they're not as absorbing. And the guage seems to sit on top of the page nicely. Some people only want to use really textured watercolor paper. So if that's you, I mean, go for it. It's totally a preference thing. So if I'm not painting in my sketchbook, I prefer to paint on hot pressed watercolor paper because the surface is super, super smooth. I think the paint can flow a little bit easier across the surface. And I actually don't even bother with using 100% cotton paper because that part doesn't matter to me as much. This is an example of a big sheet of A4 hot press watercolor paper. And I made a little mixing chart on it so that I could see what each of my colours looked like when tinted with white. And I actually just fold this up and keep it inside my, my sketch books when I go outside to paint. So it's just a really quick reference.
3. Quick Tips: If you don't want to use the palette box to get a paper towel, cut it up into a strip like this, and dropped some water on it so that it is quite wet. Don't want it to be pooling up with water, but you want it to be stuck to your palate like that. And the entire thing should be saturated. Then when you put your paint on it, you're going to notice some of the paint will kind of soak into the paper towel. That's just one of those things that's gonna happen. It's fine. Don't worry. The one really important thing with wash, probably the most important thing is water control. And by that I mean, how much water is in your brush. When you add more water, you're gonna get a very translucent or transparent effect. So let's just get a nice watery blue and put it on the paper. And you can see it's almost, you know, can't even see it that well, I can add a little more. It almost looks like watercolor. When we do this, it looks very, very similar. The only thing with washes that if you put wash into water, it tends to sit in place a little bit more than watercolor wood. Doesn't flow across the paper quite as much as water color. If we want a really thick application, we want to make sure we soak out as much water as we can from the rush. We don't want we want it to be slightly damp, but no extra water in there. And then we can load up the brush and put that on the paper. The more water you have in your brush, the more you're going to notice it gets lighter in any of the areas where the water is mixing with the paint. So like the edges of that brushstroke are a little bit lighter. That's where the water is revealing itself. So obviously my brush had too much water or I didn't have enough pain. That's a nice solid line. There's barely any water in there. One really good exercise for you guys if you're brand new to wash would be to draw or to paint something like this. So paint a solid square or rectangle or whatever shape you want, and then come in with a diluted version and see the difference. And you can quickly get a feel for how much water in your brush is gonna make a difference. You only need the slightest amount of water in your brush to get to dilute the paint and get more of a transparent look. As I mentioned when I was talking about my supplies, I have two whites, Zinc White and permanent white. Zinc way is more of a mixing light. It's a little bit more transparent and you get brighter mixes with your colors. Permanent way is. Purely white, opaque. It's crazy bright. So this is really good for getting the brightest highlights in your painting. At the very end of the painting, you can use either when you mix. I'm just letting you guys know that there are differences out there. One thing that can happen while you're painting is that if you let your piles of paint dry out and you try to go back and use them, you have to activate it with water. So you're going to end up with a transparent brushstroke like that. So ideally you want to mix more than you think you're going to need. When you mix with a brush, you can easily end up with streaks or splotches and your bristles can get clogged. So I prefer to mix with a palette knife. I only put little dollops of paint on my thing as just an example. Usually you need quite a bit more pain on your palette to make bigger mixes depending on how big your painting is. So let's grab that. Let's go with some Blue and mix that up. That looks relatively even. And make sure a brush is clean as well. Get all the excess water off of your bristles. And then we can paint a nice solid bit of green. And as you're going, depending on how much space you have to fill up, you may need to clean off your brush again and then soak up the excess water, dip it back into that pile of pain. And if we didn't mix enough of that green, it's going to reveal how much hell like water you need to add to get it to flow. So again, mix more than you think you need. Don't worry about wasting your pain. It's really rare for me to end up with a ton of extra pain in a session. And the more you do it, the more you'll get used to how much you need to mix. One of the beautiful things about goulash is that it can be reactivated forever. So if I want to maybe add a gradient to this square, i don't need to mix a new set of green and white. I just can add white to the bottom of that and slowly drag it up into the green. And it's reactivating the paint that's already there. Can add some more and make it even brighter. This is why I find it similar to working with oil. It's much trickier, I think, than oil because it drives so quickly and because of the water control issue. But again, those are things that you just get used to over time. See what it looks like when we add a bit of red to the other end. But because it can be reactivated forever, it can also be tricky if you get it wet to I'm accident. So I accidentally dropped some water in there and if I try to remove it, you're going to see that it reactivated all that pain already that are that was already down. And now I have to deal with this splotch. So in this case it might be best to just start over, dry it off, reapply the pain in thick so that it covers it completely and go from there. Let's take a look at how guage looks on these three different types of paper. This one is hot pressed watercolor paper. This middle one is Arches cold pressed and it has a layer of watercolor, so it's almost like toned paper. And then this one is Strathmore toned paper, usually used for sketching. I have my quinacridone magenta straight out of the tube. And we're going to lay it on nice and thick. This is one of the more transparent colors, in my opinion. Same with Alizarin crimson. And we have the arches. Then we have our toned sketch paper. Tried to use a, a liberal amount of paint on here because we're going to see how it looks as it dries. So this shows that even though I have layered on a ton of paint, it's still slightly transparent. You can tell because there are a couple areas that are really dark and that's where the pain is at its thickest. And that's the true color of the paint. But because it's pretty transparent, most of it is going to appear this brighter pinkish red color. In addition, you can see that the hot press paper versus the cold press paper has a different look to it because this one is completely smooth, whereas the cold pressed has all that texture. So it has all these little ridges. The dried paint reflects the light a little bit different and it appears lighter. So again, it's something to consider with whatever type of paper you like to use. So again, I'm going to demonstrate what happens when we get drag wash wet, whether it's on purpose or by accident, it doesn't matter because it changes everything. Even if this has been Dr. for months or years, I can always come back in with some water and reactivate it. Same with this one. You can get it pretty light with lots of water. Toned paper, which is basically sketch paper. It doesn't like to have a ton of water on it, so it could degrade the paper quite quickly. This color definitely reveals its pink tones once it's more diluted, or if you mixed it with white. And just for fun, let's push the gloss even further and add some white. And I'll show you how, even though we're messing with it a lot. We can still change the change the color, change the tone. You could be blending what are any color you want into this? This is what I love about hogwash because you have all the time in the world to play with it and get your nice blends. Again, that's why I say a lot that it reminds me of oil. However, of course, it drives way faster than oil. Toned paper. Not sure how this one's going to do, but we'll see. Don't use the toned paper quite as often though I do enjoy it. Again, this paper is not made for really wet media, so you can see it's sort of breaking down a little bit. But it does the trick. So you can see the operas paper and the tone paper are both extremely smooth papers. There's really no texture showing through. I recommend trying a bunch of different types of paper and see which one you get along with the best.
4. Color Mixing: Now this is a judgment free zone, right? I sure hope so because I have a bit of a problem, an obsession you see with color mixing charts and Swatch sheets. But I have to say that the more I go through this painting journey, the more I realize how important these are as tools for learning not only about color, but also about an individual paint medium. Galoshes specially is just one of the most finicky mediums, not only in color mixing, but just how the paint handles. Water control will be extremely important with squash. And I know people say that all the time with watercolor and it is especially with watercolor, but with guage. Diluting the pain with water completely changes its properties and its colors. And using it very thick does something else. So having a good idea about how much water you need to get a certain look or to make the paint act in a certain way is crucial. Hence, the color mixing charts. Now, this in particular is just a swatch sheet. This is what the color looks straight out of the tube when it's dry. And you'll quickly notice that guage experiences a drying shift. When it's wet, it has a certain look and when it dries, it either looks darker or lighter and it becomes completely Matt. So using charts like this to know what the colors look like when they're dry. And what all the mixes look like is just so incredibly useful when we dive into our landscape painting. If you're unfamiliar with making these charts or do you just find the process of drawing out the grid to be tedious? You can just use my free downloadable charts. They are jpegs and PDF, so just depends on what programs you have. And you can just print them out on your printer using watercolor paper. Each printer is going to be different, so you'll have to look up how to do that with specialty paper on your own before you get started. This grid allows us to mix five colors. So I'm going to use primary yellow, geranium, which is a red color, cobalt, turquoise, white, and black. I recommend writing the names down first so that you always know which color you're using at any time, right? The names in a specific order along the top of the page. And then on the side of the page you're going to use that same order starting from top to bottom. In the end, we want our chart to look something like this. The diagonal down the center of the chart is the pure colors straight out of the tube. On the top right half of the chart, we have an even 50-50 mix of our primary colors. And then on the bottom left side we have an even 50-50 mix, but then we add white, so we get a much paler, almost pastel version of that mix. I'll show you different angles as I'm painting because when galoshes wet, it has a bit of a shine to it and it looks a little bit different when it dries completely mat. It has a color shift. So for instance, lighter colors dried darker and darker colors dried lighter. This is why it's super important to do a swatch chart and a mixing chart so that you know what your colors are gonna do before you jump into painting a landscape. So as we paint our way down these pure colors in the middle, we need to think about how we're going to mix them on the rest of the chart. So as I mentioned in the top half or top right part of the chart, I'm doing a 50-50 mix of the two colors. And this is kind of based on just my visual gauge of where I'm at. So if I think it's a little bit too much leaning towards one color, I will adjust it as I go until I think it looks about 50-50. Now because guage tends to dry quickly, I find it useful to paint in a few of these 50-50 mixes and then add a bit of white to them and do the bottom left part of the chart When I still have that fresh paint mixed. So on the bottom left again, we're adding white, so we get a pastel version of the mix. And once again, it's more of a visual thing. So I don't want it to be to light. I want it to be a pastel version of that color. And I also want to point out that I'm mixing my color with a palette knife rather than my brush. Because when I mix with a brush, it tends to clog up the bristles in. Sometimes you end up with one particular color getting stuck in a bristle here or there. And then you end up with brilliant lake streak of that color through your mix and it's no good. You could do a similar version to this chart. Instead of adding white to the bottom left part, you could just dilute the mix so you could see what it looks like when it's thin down slightly. Which is also incredibly useful because a lot of times in my landscapes, I start off with a more thin down layer and then I work my way up to a thicker and thicker layer. This next chart is a really great way to get to know one specific color more intimately. So choose one of your favorite colours and then eight other colors you want to mix with it. The top row is going to be all of the 50-50 mixes. And then as we approach the bottom of the chart will continually add white until we get a very, very light version of the mix. So for this first column, I have my peer colors straight out of the tube at the very top, and then I slowly make it later in later towards the bottom of the page. Next we have jet-black. So I have my 50-50 mix of jet black at the top, and I make it later in later as I get to the bottom. And I continue this down the entire chart with each specific color. The whole point is to see not only how the cobol turquoise mixes with each of those, which again, is like a 50-50 mix at the top of the chart. But then we also see the various tents that we can get with it as we add white. And this is so useful when we're doing landscapes because I personally find that it's really rare when I only need to have a perfect 50-50 mix of a color. More often than not, I'm adding white to it, or maybe even black or another color to neutralize it a little bit. And those in-between colors are the real stars of the show. This next chart is a really great way to get to know two colors and how they play together. And you should be thinking about these more as rows rather than one big chart. On the left side you have one color and on the right side you have another color and in-between your sort of bridging the gaps. So you're trying to create a nice even gradient between the two colors. This is probably the most difficult chart that I've made because it really has a lot to do with water control, as well as getting a nice step-by-step mix of those two colors. I had to redo this one about three times. This, you're seeing the first version and you can see how streaky it is and how kind of messy it is and how sometimes my colors seem a little bit backwards or there's boxes that should be switched. I sometimes even go back and paint over a box if I need to. I recommend doing this chart above all other charts except maybe the color wheel, which I'll show you next, because it is so great for getting these individual mixes and all of the various tins between two colors. And I think this is what happens much more often in our landscape paintings. We're not really going to be mixing just a 50-50 mix all the time. We're going to be getting lots of subtleties between two colors. Plus these rows are really convenient once you cut them out, you can just toss them in your backpack and take them with you in your painting outside. And you can even hold them up against the landscape and see how you can match that color and your painting. And then we have the color wheel. And basically what you do is choose three colors. I'm using three primaries. So a yellow, a red, and a blue, and Indian, we wanted to look something like this. The center of the chart is white and the outer ring of the chart is mixed with black. Will paint our three main colors into one of these spots. And then we'll make mixes to bridge these areas together. And finally, we'll add white and black to complete the wheel. It makes much more sense once you get started. Once I have my primary colors or whatever my three main colors are in place, I'll then do the white version. So I just add a bit of white until I get a nice pastel version, and that is going towards the center. And then while I've still got my fresh paint on the palette, I'll mix with black and add the outer ring. Again. This is all just really great practice for how to get a consistent, smooth application of pain. So really just getting used to the water control. Sometimes your mixes might be a little too dry or a little too wet, but you'll really start to get a handle on how much water you need the more you do this. Next, we're gonna paint in our tertiary colors. This just means we take our primaries and we mix them. So blue and yellow equals green. But we're not making a 50-50 mix. We're doing a version that leans more towards yellow or more towards blue. This is a color bias which is way more helpful in painting landscapes than just creating 50-50 mixes of everything. Everyone sees color a little bit differently, which is a fascinating topic on its own. But doing this type of chart really helps you to practice how to tint color more towards yellow or more towards red, which is going to be really important when you jump into painting landscapes. Now you might be wondering, Sara, what is the deal? Why do I have to make all these charts? Well, you don't have to obviously. But in my experience, and making these charts is such amazing practice for being able to mix the subtle colors that you're going to need in a landscape. So it's up to you to figure out which chart is the most helpful for you. And I would say make a few different versions of it depending on which colors you like to use. So feel free to download these templates and let me know if you run into any problems. But otherwise, I hope you guys have fun making your charts. I find the color wheel to be really useful for giving me a nice variety of what is possible with the three colors.
5. Diluted Gouache Demos: My first demo is going to show you how I use wash when I want to use it more like watercolor, which means I just thin it down with water. This misty winter scene in the Scottish Highlands seemed like the perfect subject. To demonstrate how to use squash in a more fluid way. To start off, I simply get the paper wet with clean water. Only in the places where I want the guage to flow. Wash doesn't flow quite as easily as watercolor, although you'll see that it does have a good amount of movement to it. But because the pigment particles are a bit bigger, they will sit in place a little bit easier on the paper. Since I want my mountain to fade up off the top of the page, I'm using very, very little pigment there and I'm letting it just flow in that water. At the same time, I'll add a bit of colour to the foreground. Not only to get a bit of land in there, but also it kinda gives me an idea of where my lighting is in the painting. So for instance, I do want to emphasize that pop of color and the foreground. And it just helped, it will help me later when I'm adding the darker areas and the more muted tones in the mountain. Before the paper dries, I'm going to start touching in some of the darker values of the mountain because I still want them to fade up into that missed. When you put the pigment down into the wet areas, you'll see that it sort of sits in place so you can kind of guide it with your brush just a little bit and maybe tilt your paper. But it is a tricky balance between getting enough water and not too much water. Because you want your values to start darkening up and we can't have a ton of water in there. Otherwise, the pigment, the pigment will just fly across the paper. So if you wanted to sort of sit in place, you have to find that right balance of how much water versus pigment you need. This really only comes with practice and repetition. So maybe if you're gonna do a scene like this, you could do a few thumbnails just to get an idea of how much your paint is going to flow in the water and how little water you need in order to get that nice transparent layer. I'm using very, very stylized placement and brushstrokes here. I'm not trying to overly control anything. I'm kind of just hinting at the various colors that I see in the lens in the mountain. And I even occasionally will splash certain areas with color so that I get a wide variety of textures and just a, just anything that will reduce the amount of repetition or big, solid areas of color. Because when you look at the reference photo, you can see how much variety there is. Even in the bigger area of forest. It's not just a big green blob. There's lots of little vertical shadows, I guess I would call them based on the shape of the actual trees. And yes, there's a lot of repetition there in form. But since we only have a small space on our page, I'm choosing to simplify the overall forms, but I still want to make sure I have enough variety to indicate that there's a lot going on there. When I start moving into the foreground tree area, I'm going to start using thicker paint. I haven't waited for the paper to dry 100%, but the fact that I'm using thicker paint now, it's going to start sitting on the surface of the paper. Not going to be able to move quite as much. So again, I'm using very simplified forms here. I'm not sitting there and painting every single tree that I see. It's more about bigger shapes. These more solid forms in the foreground are going to make that background appear even more Misty because of the difference in the edges. So in the background we have those nice soft edges and that'll contrast against these sharper edges in the foreground. Right now I'm in the area where I'm gonna put the barn. But because we're using an opaque medium, unlike watercolor, we don't have to paint around our highlights. So I mean, yes, you can if you want to, but I know that I can just lay in all of my trees and make sure everything looks good there. Before I do the highlights where my barn is going to be, I do want to mention that I didn't wait for my layer to dry completely. So as I'm putting in my lighter color here, it's already blending into that background color, so it is tinting my color. If you don't want that to happen, just wait for your layers to dry 100% and then you can move on to using that thicker pain and getting nice clean color. This is something I'll talk about more in the next lesson when I show you how to paint really thick with wash. And then before I get too bogged down in all of the barn details, I want to come back into the foreground and adjacent tree line to define some of that a little bit more. In the foreground, I'm going to use pretty much a dry brush technique. So my brush has very little water on it. It's almost all pure pigment. And I'm sweeping it gently across the surface of the paper to allow it to kinda dance across that texture. And you'll get a little bit of a rougher look. So for me, I think it works really well for like grasses or even fully edge or anything like that, that you need a lot of visual texture. Now that my layer has dried a little bit more, I can come back again with clean color and I can add a bit more highlight without worrying about it blend into that wet layers that I already had down. I can also add my other Bern, which I honestly don't know why I keep calling them burns because they're more like just houses, but it's a farmland. So there you go. And again, now that the background is dry, I can add all of the opaque details that I want. And it's much easier to avoid getting all those muddy colors. I probably could have done this whole painting with very diluted guage and used it. Basically the same as watercolor. But then what's the point? If in that case I would have just used watercolor. But I do love this whole method of using very, very diluted washes of wash in the background. And then working my way up towards thickness in the foreground for all of the fun little details. I have seen quite a few painters use watercolor for pretty much 99% of the painting and then just do their final little highlights in little details in guage, which is a totally viable way to do it as well. So it really just depends on your preference and what you prefer working with more. But I love being able to show the versatility of goulash. It is maybe surprising to know all of these awesome little textures and different looks that you can get with it. So I encourage you to keep experimenting. I actually have a successfully added salt to a watered-down wash layer. And it didn't get quite as crazy as it would with watercolor, but it works. So there you go, go experiment and have fun. Next up we're going to paint a serine lake scene. And once again, we're going to use very diluted paint in the background and build up our thickness towards the foreground. I was inspired by some local scenery, so I don't have an exact reference photo, but I'm using these photos as a general guide. So to start off, we're just going to lay in a big gradient. And I'm going to shift mind from like a bluish purple down into a very warm, peachy color. And in order to do that, we just need to use broad brushstrokes, quick back and forth, bleeding the colors into each other. So kinda going up and down across the gradient in order to make a nice smooth transition. And after that drives, I'm going to start laying in my horizon line. And I'm using a much more opaque version of that first warm, peachy color. And basically I'm just laying in a very subtle shadow underneath that kind of fades off. And then at the top, I'm actually swell very loosely rendering my trees. And we don't really need to worry about defining the trees here because it is just going to be like are supporting character in the painting and be way off in the distance. And then on the left side I'm going to use more of a warm, yellowish orange color and lay in my even further horizon, which are like trees way off in the distance across the water. And then bring that slowly to the right by just blending it into the color that's already there. And it just indicates that the sun is starting to rise and it's pouring through those trees. And the beauty of galoshes that we can always reactivate it in Keith laying in our color and blending into what's already there. In the foreground. We're gonna go a little bit darker and a little more saturated. And I'm using a slightly warmer tones here. And what I imagined here aren't just these big mounds of grass. So I'm just taking my brush, spreading the bristles out a little bit and creating long whiskey grass textures that start from the bottom and go upwards. And you can kinda play with variations of color here, like throw in a little more orange or a little more red here in there. And just keep kinda going back and forth between the two so that they blend nicely. You can pretty much do the same effect if you have a fan brush, as long as the bristles aren't too big, this brush is not super springy. I mean, when I push it in a certain direction is stays in place. So I'm able to actually like spread the bristles myself and use it in that way. You could also use just a very, very fine like script brush if you don't have this, just as long as you're creating really soft, wispy, grassy textures there. As that's drawing, I'm gonna go back up on top and lay in a little bit more warmth in those background trees. Just because as it dries, you start to notice maybe things didn't look. They don't look the way that you thought they would or maybe it's a little bit too dark or a little bit too light. We're constantly gauging what's happening in the painting as it dries because with guage, we do have to deal with that color shift. When it comes to the foreground trees, I wanted to have fun with the textures and do a little bit of a splashy look for the leaves. So I load up my brush with lots of water and pigment and I tap it against something hard like this ruler. And it just releases the pigment in sort of a spray. And instead of sitting there and drawing every single leaf, which, you know is impossible, especially at this size. It just indicates that there's lots of leaves and it's a little more lively. And you'll notice that I'm not varying my color palette too much. For the most part, I'm sticking within this peachy burgundy color range. Sometimes adding a little bit more rows are a little bit more yellow. But in order to keep this very serene, soft, almost pastel look that the landscape has, we need to say in a limited color palette. And this color that I'm currently using is technically my darkest dark in the whole painting. Now when it comes to adding the tree branches and the other little scraggly branches that stick out of the ground. We wanna make sure that we don't repeat ourselves too much or make it look too uniform. And for me, what helps is drawing from life and I practice, I love during trees, so I'm always practicing. And once you've done quite a few times, you just kinda get a feel for how the branches actually grow. And you'll notice that they're kind of unpredictable. So occasionally the branches will be going up and then suddenly they'll turn off to the left or the right. And you can just have a lot of fun with that and make it interesting, Marx, in order to represent the branches. And make sure you don't let your leaves dry too much before you start doing these branches because you actually want them to fade in and out of those clusters of leaves. As I get towards completing the painting, I'm kinda just looking here in there for little details like an ad. But overall, keeping it very simple, not filling it with too much because we want the focus to be on that beautiful warm light pouring across the water. So I hope these demos gave you a couple ideas for how you can use guage more diluted in combination with some thicker layers. In the next lesson, we're going to jump into how to use guage very thickly.
6. Thick Gouache Demo: When using thick wash, There are a couple of important things we need to keep in mind. By thick guage, I simply mean we're not adding water to the paint. We can get our brush a little bit damp because that is actually a necessary part of the process. But we're not diluting the pain at all. It will behave quite similarly to oil pain in how it blends, but it will dry very quickly. And due to the heavy pigment load of gloss, using it very thick will result in extremely vibrant colors that almost look like pastels when they're dry. And because of that, it's super important to mix custom colors unless you want your final painting to be a bit more primary, I guess I would say. So if you prefer to use colors straight out of the tube and, or want your, your painting to have a very, very colorful, almost garish look, then that's totally fine. But if you want to have some more subtleties in your colors and in your highlights and shadows. This is where you want to practice your color mixing. And again, going back to the lesson about color mixing and making the charts, that's when you can really familiarize yourself with how your paints play together. Non-important strategy for me when I'm using thick wash is to use base colors before laying in my detail. So here you see I've already laid in pretty bright green in the background and now I'm laying in a base color for my tree trunks. I'm going to continuously come back into these areas and add more detail and more variation. But I find that it's a bit easier to get detailed When I already have something to work with. And when doing a more complex scene like a forest, there's so much going on in there. Unless you're going for a very minimal illustrative type, look, you want to have a lot of variety. So you're going to have lots of different greens, overlaying textures, and building up that variety slowly throughout the painting. When mixing custom colors to get a nice variety, I find that I'm using white in pretty much every mix that I make. Sometimes I do use the colors straight out of the tube, but I eventually blend it with something else. It's not always just sitting there on its own, on the paper. So one of the wonderful things about goulash is having that flexibility, being able to blend into it forever, basically. And getting the subtleties, having the edges shift into each other and getting some soft blends here and there. And I want to encourage you to have patients during this process because it takes time to build up all of the details and all of their variety in your painting. And at some point you're going to look at it and think, oh, this is awful. Like right now at this point in the painting, I was thinking This is so ugly. But I knew if I stuck with it and I kept layering and I kept blending, I would eventually get it to the point that I was happy with it. So eventually I would have my variety of colors and my nice wonderful blends. All the beautiful textures that were in my mind. And you really just need to stick with it. Just really quick. This is the reference photo that I'm working with. However, I am not copying it exactly. It's more of an inspiration, especially with the dapper light effect that's happening. And the way that the light is casting down onto those tree trunks in my painting, I'm actually backlighting it so the background is going to be much, much brighter rather than darker. So if you are brand new to painting landscapes, I do recommend that you paint and copy reference photos because you learn so much in that process. However, the more you do it and if it starts getting boring to do that, you can totally just make up your own stuff and use our reference photos or paint from life, using it as inspiration. I personally have way more fun when I use my photos as loose inspiration for lighting or color. And then make it up as I go. And in the end, I'm more connected to my painting because it came out of my mind. So anyways, when it comes to actually painting with thick wash. You're gonna know a, notice a pretty big difference from using it. Very diluted because of how it behaves and how quickly it dries when you're using diluted wash. You have the benefit of the water soaking into the paper and flowing and it just, it lets you spend a little bit longer moving things around with thick wash. A lot of times you'll do a sweep of color onto the paper and it almost instantly dries. And you deal with all sorts of crazy things like dry brush textures and the way that it blends into the color next to it or underneath it. So those are some of the trickiest things to get used to. But if you just embrace the fact that it does dry quickly and you get that benefit of the blending, then it becomes so much more enjoyable. It's a little difficult to see happening in this video, but I'm actually constantly dipping my brush in my water and drying off. The reason I do that is because it almost refreshes the brush in a way. So if I don't do that, the brush bristles get clogged up with the thick paint. And that is extremely frustrating when you're trying to move the paint across the paper. When the bristles are clogged, the paint just doesn't flow off of the brush very well. So pretty much anytime I switched between different colors, or maybe even just every 30 seconds or so, I will dip my brush and the water, give it a little swirl and then debit off on my paper towel or my cloth. And it will instantly refresh it and give me a much better flow. Sometimes we want our layers to blend into each other. And if I used enough pressure on my brush or out of the teeny bit of water, I could reactivate the layer that's below it and get some nice soft blending. However, when I'm doing crisp details like this, I just absolutely have to be patient and let the layer below dry first. If you want, you can use lots of grays and more subtle colors as I mentioned before. But it's so easy to add pops of color because of the, the, just the general quality of the pigment. So I especially find it fun in the final layers to add hints of vibrancy here, in there. And really bring out the beauty of the squash, which in my opinion looks like pastel a lot of times because it's Matt and incredibly pigments. As we're nearing the end of this class, I quickly want to mention that this is actually the first video or first-class in a series of goulash classes. So I've received so many comments on my other classes regarding guage, especially and on YouTube, I continually receive just endless comments and questions about guage. So it's clear to me that there is a desire out there for people to paint landscapes with wash. And for some reason you guys like the way I do it. So I am more than happy to share as much knowledge as I can on this topic and demonstrate as many different types as I can. So in the coming months, maybe even every few weeks, I will be releasing new byte size guage classes. So maybe focusing on particular topics or techniques within guage or very specific scenes and doing like full walkthroughs of how to paint that scene. So if you are interested, make sure you're following me here on skill share and you'll be notified every time I post a new class. If you are new to painting landscapes and you want to get a better handle on how to do that. I have a ton of other skill share classes that walk you through step-by-step, how to draw and paint with a variety of mediums, different elements like water, waves, rocks, everything. So you'd go check those out if you need a little bit of help there. But if you are here because specifically to learn wash and you already have a pretty good idea of how to paint landscapes. Then I hope this lesson or this demo has been helpful. I am more than happy to answer questions that you have that I maybe didn't get to, or if there's something else you'd like to see me demonstrate in the future and maybe like a shorter bite size class, please let me know. I would love to see your guises class exercises. So if you end up painting something from my reference photos and you want to post it online, please use the hashtag. Sarah Burns tutor. I love seeing what you guys come up with, especially with goulash, which is just one of my all-time favorite paints. And before we end, let's take a look at this Guangxi goodness of close.
Sarah Burns, Painter / Photographer / Youtuber
