Introduction to Gouache through a Vibrant Wildflower Garden Painting

1. Introduction: If you're interested in art and follow a lot of artists on social media, it's quite likely that you've come across this new medium called gouache a lot recently. Book illustrators, surface pattern designers, lettering artists, graphic designers, they all seem to love this paint. So what is gouache and what's all the fuss about? Well, this class covers it all for you. I'm Devika, an artist illustrator and surface pattern designer from India. I'm also the artist behind the brand. The Artsychoke. I have been painting since forever and art has always been my one true passion. In 2018, I put a stop to my architectural practice and started making art, hoping to make a career out of it. Thus, the Artsychoke was born in this little corner of my room. Today, my little studio still remains the same, but the Artsychoke has grown into a brand selling original artworks and illustrations, handmade products and patterns for licensing. You can also find my art on a wide range of products like tech accessories, home decor, clothing, stationery, et cetera on print, on demand websites like Society6, Redbubble, and Teepublic. My work portfolio is quite varied because I like to dabble with lots of different kinds of art and medium. You'll find a lot of botanical art, architectural illustrations, traditional Indian art like these Kerala mural paintings, abstract acrylic paintings, watercolor landscapes, digital and hand drawn patterns, and many more. And much like other artists, I've taken a fancy to gouache in the recent years as well. I paint almost all of my illustrations and patterns using gouache, and I'm in love with this medium. In this class, I will teach you how to paint a vibrant wildflower garden using gouache. And by doing so, I hope to teach you everything that I know about this fascinating medium. So, I welcome you to my fifth Skillshare class. We will really get to know gouache by playing around a lot with it in this class. We will explore different characteristics of gouache, and three techniques of painting with it. And once we're past the formal introduction stage, we will paint this vibrant wildflower garden with our new friend. Additionally, in this class, you will also learn a couple of more simple tricks or techniques. I will show you how to paint colorful flowers by loading different colors on your brush. This is a simple technique called one stroke painting. And you can use it to get beautiful color gradients in your brush strokes. This is a technique that you can apply not only with gouache paints, but with other wet mediums like watercolors and acrylics. Through this wildflower garden illustration, you will also learn to paint a rather busy looking composition that has depth and dimension using simple methods of painting in layers. So in addition to being an introduction to gouache, this class is also loaded with techniques and tips of painting with gouache. And these are techniques that you can apply to other wet mediums as well. We will start the class by talking about all the materials we'll need. Then we'll cover lessons on introduction to goache, its properties, its differences and similarities to watercolors and acrylics. After that will be a fun lesson on just testing the paints, playing around and experimenting and trying out different painting techniques like blending and layering to really get the hang of painting with this medium. Then I will show you how to paint a few colorful flowers by loading the brush with different colors. And after that, we will move on to paint our wildflower garden. This is a super easy beginner level class and it's ideal for anyone looking for an easy introduction to gouache, through a short and simple project. That said, it is not exclusively for beginners. It could be a fun class for you even if you're not a beginner because who knows, you might learn something new and interesting. The goals of this class are to introduce you to gouache paints and hopefully make you like them. To teach you a couple of painting techniques with Gouache. To show you how to get multiple colors in one brush stroke for painting flowers. To show you how to paint a vibrant garden filled with flowers in three simple steps. All right, if you're ready to dive into the class, I'll meet you in the next video. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is to paint this little garden filled with flowers. But don't worry, I'll be painting along with you through the class, taking you through the whole process step by step, I'll show you how to mix your paints, blend your background blue, lay your greens, and add the flowers. It'll be fun, I promise. And once you're done with your project, please upload them to the project gallery, because I would love to see your work. You can do this by clicking the Submit Project button under the Projects and Resources tab. All right, let's start the class by talking about the materials you will need. 3. Materials: You don't need a lot of materials for this class, you just need gouache paints, obviously. Paper, brushes, palette, two jars of water, paper napkin and masking tape. Now, this one isn't compulsory. It will be helpful to use masking tape when doing our blending exercise though. Now let's go over the materials a little bit in detail. There are a lot of brands of gouache available in the market. I'm using this brand called Brustro. It's great quality and pretty economical compared to other artist brands out there, so I can recommend this for you to start with if you're looking for a budget friendly option. Now when it comes to paper, there are multiple options available for gouache. Essentially, what you need to look for is paper that can hold water well. Hence, watercolor paper is a great option. I usually use 300 gsm watercolor paper. 300 is pretty thick so it can hold the paint well. Now, watercolor paper itself comes in two different types, cold pressed and hot pressed. Cold pressed paper has a more distinctive texture, while hot pressed paper is more smooth. I usually use a lot of cold pressed paper for my floral illustrations and patterns because I love this texture. But I do occasionally use hot pressed paper as well, So it's really just a matter of personal preference. For this class, I'm using the smooth hot pressed paper from a brand called Scholar. Now some other brands that I have tried and like for watercolor paper are Brustro, Strathmore, and Canson. They're all very good. You can also use multimedia paper for gouache paints. Just make sure that they're at least 250gsm thick so they don't buckle while painting on them. Let's talk about brushes. Now the rule of thumb for choosing brushes when it comes to gouache is simple and straightforward. Pick small brushes for smaller areas and larger ones for larger areas. This rule is especially important while layering paints. Because gouache paints are water based, regular watercolor brushes work just fine. For this class, I'll be using an assortment of brushes. I'm using round brushes in sizes 9, 5 and 1. And flat brushes in sizes 6 and 1. When it comes to brushes, I don't usually stick to one particular brand. I just go to my local art store and pick out ones that have soft bristles and feel like they're decently good quality. Let's talk about palette. Now anything that has a smooth, clean surface would work as a palette. You can use an artist's palette, a plate, a shallow dish, or even lids of plastic containers. I usually switch between two favorites, this ceramic plate and this biggish palette with a lot of compartments. The reason for picking one over the other usually depends on things like the purpose and the quantity of paint required. For example, for today's class, I'm using the ceramic plate because I know I won't be using large quantities of any color, and I don't foresee doing a lot of mixing to make new colors. But when I work on larger paintings where I know I will need to mix a large quantity of paint, I will use my larger palette. It has these little wells where I can mix up a lot of paint. And, if there is any leftover paint, I can just store them in this palette itself. I cannot store any paint on the ceramic plate since they'll dry out and also they'll be exposed to dust and other things. We will definitely need a jar of water for mixing the paints and washing the brushes. From my experience, I have learned that it's better to have two jars of water while painting, not just with gouache, for any wet medium actually. You can use one jar to wash paint off your brushes, and another jar for adding to the paint to mix it up. That way you don't have to keep changing your water multiple times through your painting session. It just makes the whole process more efficient. Paper napkins are essential to dab your brushes and take off excess paint or water, or quickly clean up any mess or mistakes that may happen. It frequently happens when I paint. Now, like I said earlier, artist tape is not a compulsory requirement for this class, but it would be extremely helpful to have one when we do our blending exercises. We will be doing the same blending exercise for our wild flower garden also, so it'll be good if you can try to get hold of one. 4. Hello Gouache!: It's time to introduce you to gouache. So what is gouache? Well, in technical terms, gouache is a water based paint that combines natural or synthetic pigments with water and a binding agent like gum Arabic. And in simpler terms, it's commonly called opaque watercolors because it behaves a lot like watercolors. But unlike watercolors which are translucent, gouache is opaque. It's also thicker and creamier than watercolors, which makes it a little more similar to acrylic paints. It is also highly pigmented, which means the colors are vivid and saturated, again, quite similar to acrylic paints. So because of these characters, gouache can be categorized as a hybrid between watercolors and acrylics. Oh here's a little fun trivia - Gouache has been around for quite a long time, with documentation of it being used in some form or the other since ancient Egyptian times. So, although we started hearing about it only recently, gouache is actually old news. It started regaining popularity with artists and illustrators recently because of its vivid colors, flexibility, quick drying, and a lot of other properties. So what's all the fuss about anyway? To understand that, we will have to go over the characteristics of gouache a little bit in detail. A lot of artists love gouache because it has both qualities of water colors and acrylic paints. Let's do small swatches of all three paints to get an idea about their similarities and differences. I'll make swatches of the same color in all three mediums to make it, let's say, a fairer comparison. I'm starting with blue in watercolor. And as you can see, it's really transparent and free flowing. It's actually going to be even more lighter when it dries. Now making a swatch of blue in gouache, and it's much more thicker and creamier and way more opaque. It may look glossy now because it's wet, but once it dries, you'll see that it has a matte texture. And as is obvious, it's a lot more pigmented than the water color. That said, if I add a lot more water to this, it will look very, very similar to the water color swatch. But we'll get into that in a bit. Next, I'm doing a swatch of blue in acrylic paint. And you can see that the paint itself is much heavier than watercolor, though may be a bit similar to gouache. It is also pretty pigmented and opaque like gouache. But when it dries though, the glossiness will remain. So the paints are all dry now, and you can really see how translucent the watercolors are once they've dried. They're also a lot less saturated as compared to when we applied them on the paper. The gouache, on the other hand, is still very saturated and opaque, and so is the acrylic paint. It's dried opaque, is as saturated as it was when wet, but it still has a glossy sheen. Now, let's see what happens when we try to rewet the paints. I've just dipped my brush in some clean water and I'm lightly running it along the edge of the watercolor swatch here. And you can see how the color is getting reactivated and I'm able to just pull some of that paint out with the brush. I'm trying the same with gouache, and yup, the same thing's happening. The colors are activated again and I'm able to pull them out to some extent. I'm doing the same with the acrylic swatch now. And, nope. It's still dry and completely permanent now. So gouache shares its reactivation property with watercolors, but not with acrylics, as acrylics become permanent and resistant to water once they are dried. Here's a broad comparison chart for you to better understand the similarities and differences between gouache, watercolors and acrylic paints. You can pause the video and have a thorough look at it. And once you've had a good look at it, we'll meet in the next lesson to learn more about painting with gouache. 5. Painting with Gouache: The first step in getting to know any kind of paint is to test out the colors in little swatches. I would recommend doing this not just for gouache, but any new medium that you want to try. I always make little swatches of all the colors whenever I want to try out a new medium. You can see all the swatch charts that I've made of all the paints that I've ever tried out. I cannot emphasize how important and useful this step is. In addition to giving you a good understanding of the thickness, opacity, pigmentation of the colors, you also get a fairly good idea of how the colors behave on that surface, how they dry - whether they dry translucent or opaque, and how some colors dry faster than the others. You get to know so much through this one step. And also, you will have a reference chart of all your colors whenever you want to pick colors for a new painting. Here's my Top Tip: Always make swatch charts of all the colors whenever you want to test out a new medium. Here's a time lapse video of me making my swatch chart. As you can see, I've put little drops of all the colors of my gouache paint set on my palette, and I'm just painting little rectangles of each color on this A4 sheet. I've used a bigger sheet because having them all on one single sheet makes it easier to use them as a reference in the future. All right, that's the finished swatch chart for my gouache paints. I've also written the names of the colors as well for easy reference. And, to be honest, I actually hadn't made a chart like this because I had initially done the swatches on my notebook. But now I also have a swatch sheet that can go up on my wall with the rest. Now another noteworthy quality of gouache paints is that they don't always dry to the same value as when they were wet. Lighter colors sometimes dry darker, and darker colors dry lighter than they are when wet. Let me show you what I'm talking about. I have here a dry swatch of flesh tint. And I'm applying a bit of wet flesh tint right next to it. I'm not sure if it's evidence through the camera, but the wet paint is visibly lighter than the dry coat. Similarly, I'm painting a bit of this blue right next to this completely dry swatch of the same color. And this fresh, wet paint is a lot darker than the dry swatch. So it's all the more important to make swatches, to know how a color dries on your finished painting. This particular quality of gouache brings me to my next top tip. Always mix up a good quantity of paint if you know you will need a lot because it's very very hard to match the colors if you need to remix them. Now let's play around with the consistency of gouache. We can change up the consistency by varying the amount of water we add to it. So here, I'm applying a little bit of this red color. The consistency is what's straight out of the tube and I haven't added any water to it. And as you can see, it's really thick and patchy. It's actually quite hard to spread around with the brush. Now, let's add a few drops of water to this. I'm just dipping the tip of my brush in the water jar and mixing it up with the paint. It's slightly better as in, it's easier to spread the paint around, but the strokes are still kind of patchy. I'm adding a bit more water to the paint now, and this time the mix is pretty creamy and velvety. And you can see that my brush just glides smoothly on paper. The paint is still very pigmented and opaque though, and I would say this is the ideal consistency that we typically want for gouache. Okay. I'm adding more water to the same mix and painting a swatch. and the paint is more runny but still pretty saturated. And like that, I'm just going to do few more swatches, each time slightly increasing the amount of water I add to the paint. And you can see that as I keep adding more water to it, the red keeps getting less saturated and it's starting to look and behave more like watercolor. So that's how gouache behaves when mixed with different amounts of water. Like I said earlier, to get a smooth, vibrant, and opaque texture. I would say the consistency we used for this third swatch here is ideal. It wasn't too dry or too watery, and it had just enough water for the brush to glide and cover an area uniformly. So usually to get this smooth flowing and opaque effect, I always try to achieve the consistency of melted ice cream. That said, you can get a full coverage with thicker consistency of paint, like the second swatch or maybe even the first swatch, but you'll need to use a lot more paint to cover the same area, it would end up being a thick layer of paint. The problem with that is gouache paints tend to crack after drying if they're used with too less water. So that's something you need to keep in mind and be careful about. Also, whenever you do add water to gouache paints, keep adding water little by little and not a whole lot right in the beginning. That way you have more control on the mixing process and know when to stop adding more water. Now, a lot of artists use gouache in different consistencies. It really depends on the kind of painting and effect that you're looking for. Say, for example, if you want a scratchy rough texture, then you can use it with no water or very little water, like the first swatch. And if you want something saturated and opaque, but need to blend two colors, then you need to add just enough water so that the consistency is such that the paints blend with each other but still retain their opacity and saturation. You can get different textures with gouache just by varying the consistency of the paint. And that is one of the many reasons a lot of artists are in love with it. It's such a versatile medium. Let's move on to some techniques of painting with gouache now, and I'll meet you in the next video for that. 6. Technique 1: Layering: The first technique we'll go through is layering, that is painting one color on top of another. Since gouache is an opaque medium, it's relatively easy to layer colors on top of each other even if it's a lighter color on top of a darker color. Well, most of the time, I believe now is the time to draw your attention to a tiny little detail that might prove useful while painting with gouache, especially when layering. So all artists quality gouache comes with an indication of opacity of its colors. I have this tube of Prussian blue here, and if you take a closer look at it, you can see this little square here. This square, which is a filled one, indicates that it's a fully opaque color. Now take a look at this lemon yellow. The square is half filled and that means the color is not completely opaque. Probably half opaque. So, if I were to paint this lemon yellow over the Prussian blue, it won't fully cover up the blue. And this isn't particularly because lemon yellow is a lighter color. Here I have this tube of flesh tint, and despite being a lighter color, the square marking indicates that it is a fully opaque color. So it probably depends on some factors like the quality and the character of the pigments used to make the colors or some other substances that go into it. Anyway, this little square tells you whether you can effectively layer a lighter color over a darker one. That said, it is still a good idea to test out your colors on paper to see how they really turn out. So let's do that. I've made these biggish swatches of a few colors here. And I've deliberately picked both dark and light colors so we can try layering light on dark and dark on light. This one here is burnt umber, This is flesh tint, lemon yellow. Then there are teal, ultramarine blue and viridian green. Now rule number one in the layering technique is always make sure the bottom layer of paint is completely dry before painting over it. That's why I painted these in advance. All these colors are completely dry. If you paint over a layer that isn't completely dry, the colors will blend with each other and it might end up looking muddy. Let's start layering some colors over these. I'm just mixing a flesh tint with some water and painting a circle over the burnt umber. and, maybe a line. And you can see that despite the square on the tube, indicating that it's a fully opaque paint, it's only partially opaque and the burnt umber is still showing through a little. So now you know not to completely trust that little square! Now let's see... I'm trying the flesh tint over the teal now. Drawing a few lines. I also want to vary the consistency of the paint so I'm taking a dry brush and let's just see how it turns out. You can see that since the paint is pretty dry, it's coming out quite streaky. It's actually a nice texture though. Now, what if I were to apply a thicker coat of paint? I'm making a circle with a generous amount of paint and it's looking a little more opaque. Same over the green. Now I'm taking a bit of the blue and layering it over the burnt umber here, and you can see that it's pretty dark. Yep, the blue is quite opaque. Let's try it on the yellow now. Now you can see here, as I'm painting the circle, the blue and yellow are starting to blend. That's because while painting the circle, I moved the brush a lot over the yellow underneath and sort of disturbed it, and this caused the paint to reactivate. I'm switching to a bigger brush as it's better to stick to as few brush strokes as possible while layering. There, that's much better! So if you want to paint a large area, switch to a larger brush so that you can paint more in less strokes. And if you just want to draw a line or dot, try to achieve that in single stroke. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you use too much water for the top layer, that might also cause your lower layer to reactivate since gouache is water based. So make sure your second coat is not too watery. Now, if you do end up activating the paint below, don't panic. It is a fixable mistake. Just wait till the paint is completely dry and paint over it, but this time make sure you do it in single, smooth strokes. Now at this point, I'm just playing around with the colors, and I encourage you to do the same. Make some lines, circles, dots, strokes, patches. Try different consistencies, and maybe even different brushes. Do whatever you feel like and follow your instinct. Go with the flow. Oh, and have some fun. This is a great learning experiment and you will get to know how different colors behave one on top of each other with different consistencies and application methods. You can also see that I've invited red to the party. Now the paints are all dry. And it's interesting to see that the yellow, when we applied, was kind of translucent, but now it's more opaque. And the teal is also pretty opaque over the burnt sienna. So yeah, some things to keep in mind while layering colors in gouache: Make sure the bottom layer is completely dry before painting over it. The top layer of paint should not be too watery and avoid too many brush strokes while painting over a layer. Use larger brush if you have to cover a larger area and use smaller brush for smaller areas. All right, now it's time to move on to the next technique and I'll meet you in the next lesson for that. 7. Technique 2: Blending: The second painting technique, we'll try out with gouache is blending. And this is where we'll need the masking tape or as some call it - artist tape. As you can see, I've taped the paper down on all four edges. Since we'll use a lot of paint for this exercise, the paper would end up bending after absorbing all that paint and water, and that's why we need to tape it down. It'll just be a lot easier to paint on a flat paper than a bent one. Now I will show you two blending exercises in this lesson. The first one is painting a monochromatic gradient. That is, we'll be blending different shades of the same color to achieve a smooth gradient. And in the second exercise, we'll try to blend two different colors to get a gradient. So first, we'll do a gradient of blue, going from dark to light as we go down. I'm mixing up this cerulean blue with water to get that nice, creamy consistency. The pain shouldn't be too thick or too runny, and I'm using my number six flat brush for this. And I start applying the paint from the top. And I try to stick to the same direction of strokes as much as possible because this helps in achieving a smoother finish. And when my strokes start to get patchy, I know it's time to reload the brush with more paint. Now once I've reached a little above the middle of the paper, I add a little bit of white to the blue to get a slightly lighter blue. And I paint that in with the same horizontal strokes. Since the original blue is still wet, both the shades blend in nicely. One thing to keep in mind while mixing up the paint is as you add more paint to the mixture, you also need to keep adding water to maintain the consistency of the mixture. Otherwise, your paint might end up getting too thick. And as I move down, I keep adding more and more white to make the blue lighter. Now you can see that I'm moving the brush up and down quite a lot as I blend. I'm just trying to smoothen out any rigid transitions I see and achieve a smoother blending effect there. I'm washing my brush at this point because it's already got a lot of blue in it, and I want to get more white than blue for the last region. So I'm mixing up more white with a little bit of blue and applying that. And again, I'm moving up and down just to smoothen out the transitions. Okay, now that I've applied the paint all over, what's left is some finishing touches here and there. So I'm washing my brush and dipping it in a little bit of clean water and slightly running it along, wherever I feel the colors are not as smoothly blended. All right, our monochromatic gradient is finished. So we worked in one main direction, top to bottom, adding more and more white to the blue as we move down. Now, it's not a rule that you should work from top to bottom or bottom to top. You can do it anyway really. This is just how I work. Now it's time to do the second blending exercise. For this one I'm blending this lighter blue with a light violet or lavender color. So I'm mixing up the blue with some white to get that lighter color and applying that on top. And I'll fill up almost half the strip with this blue. Now I'm mixing some white with violet to get the lavender color. And this time I start painting the second color from the bottom. I'll start from here and work my way up towards the blue. Giving those same horizontal strokes. And once I get closer to the blue, I mix that lavender with the blue to get that in between color and apply that in the space between the two colors. I'm mixing up some more blue to this transition color as I bridge that gap here, because I know that as I move up, the ratio of blue should be more than the lavender. This makes the gradient look more even and the transition smoother. Next, I'm washing my brush and applying some fresh blue paint again and blending up and down. And I just keep blending more by moving my brush up and down to spread that paint around. So the idea is to even out the rough transitions wherever you see them. I'm not happy with how the lavender is looking streaky here so I'm redoing that area with some fresh paint and nicely blending that up. So, these are two ways you can do blending with gouache paints. In the first exercise, we started from top with one color and just kept working our way downwards slowly adding more and more of the second color. In the second exercise, although we blended two colors, we actually used three colors, the blue, the lavender, and the transition color in between. And we worked in both directions. I also want to point out that we can paint the monochrome blue gradient the same way as we painted the second one. That is, we could have mixed all three colors and worked top to bottom first with the darkest blue, bottom to top with the lightest blue, and then the transition color in the middle. So there is no right or wrong way to go about it. You can work whichever way you're comfortable with. And with that we've completed two techniques of painting with gouache. I know it's a lot of things to keep in mind when you're just starting out with gouache and it may seem like it's hard to get the hang of painting with it, but trust me, all it takes is some patience and a little bit of practice. It's always good to do little practice sessions or trial sessions before starting a new painting. And these little exercises that we just did are great ways to get practice and have some fun. You've gouache this! In the coming lesson, I'll show you how to paint some multicolored flowers and through that we'll explore the third painting technique. 8. Let's Paint Some Flowers: The third technique of painting that I will show you in this class is something that's very similar to a technique called one stroke painting. Basically, one stroke painting is a method of painting in which you dip your brush in multiple colors and when you paint with it, you get all these colors in a single stroke of the brush. Now typically in one stroke painting, the different colors are used to get highlights and shadows on a single element. But in this class, we're not trying to emphasize the shading or highlights on an element. Instead, the aim is to get vibrant, colorful strokes with your brush. It's a very simple technique, really. All you have to do is take your brush, load it up with one color, and then dip the tip again in another color and paint with it. So let's give it a try. Now, I've grabbed a few images of flowers for us to use as reference for this exercise. So let's start with this marigold. I'm loading a good amount of this mid yellow onto my round brush first, and here as well I'm mixing up the usual consistency of melted ice cream. And then, I lightly take a little bit of red just onto the tip of the brush and I paint the petals of the marigold with the simple drag lift technique of the brush. And you can see that each stroke of the brush is giving a nice double color. So that's it. This is technique three. So, to break down the technique into two simple steps. First, you generously load your brush with a base color, and then you dip the tip of the brush in the second or even a third color. Now I'm going to see what happens if I switch the colors. That is, using red as a base color and only dipping the tip in the yellow. And I'm trying out a few strokes. Okay, I need to take some more yellow. That's better. It's a very nice, smoothly blended gradient. For the center of the flower I'm mixing a little of rose and red and just dabbing in the color. Actually I want a darker color So I'm just dabbing in a little bit of violet there as well. Note that I'm using this image as a loose reference, and I'm not trying to paint it exactly as it is. It's just for getting some inspiration for colors and shapes of the flower. So keep that in mind while you're doing this exercise. The primary focus here is to practice the technique of getting these multicolored strokes and not illustrating these flowers. So don't stress on making them look exactly like the image. All right, let's paint these tulips now. Now I'm using the same two colors, yellow and red. Yellow as the base color and the red as the secondary color. And I'm painting these three petals to get the tulip flower. Now I want to try a different flower with this rose and yellow. So I'm loading the brush with rose and taking a little bit of yellow on the tip, and just giving these simple strokes. I realize that the yellow is too much so I'm loading the brush with more rose and just a touch of yellow. I'm just trying out different flower shapes here. It also helps to get more out of the brush if you slowly rotate the brush as you paint. And keep reloading the yellow when your strokes start becoming more of rose. Okay, let's try something pink and white like these tulips. So I'm using white as the base color here and dipping the tip of the brush in this rose. I think it'll be better if I use rose as the base color so I'm washing and reloading my brush. Rose first and then a tint of white. And the strokes are coming out much nicer. It always takes a little bit of trial and error to get things right. And it's okay if you feel like this technique is a bit of a struggle. Like I said earlier, all it takes is some patients and more practice. Right. I'm trying to paint a lotus now. No idea how it's going to turn out at this point. I don't really like how those lower petals turned out so I'm trying to fix it. Yeah, that looks better now. And you can see how easy it's to correct mistakes in this technique. I can easily just paint over the petals and it's actually giving more of a three dimensional effect to the flower. Now I'm going to paint these flowers. I believe they're called Lupin? For someone who loves flowers and paints them a lot, I'm spectacularly bad at knowing their names. Anyway, I'm starting out by drawing two thin stems with green with my thinner round brush. And I'm actually switching to my size one round brush because it's a little stubbier than the size five, and I think for this particular flower, I'll get better results with this brush. I'm loading a violet as the first color and then some white. and I'm just doing a trial here to see how the strokes come out. The flowers are hoof shaped, so I give two little strokes like these. I actually notice tints of pink on the flowers as well so let's just add that in as well. It's okay if all the three colors don't turn up in a single stroke. When you look at the whole bunch, you'll see that there are traces of all three and that's enough. Now on this stem, I'm painting a bunch of single stroke flowers. And again, I just want to see how it'll turn out. Giving a bit more of the violet at the base and some emphasis on white at the top, so that I get a nice gradient along the stem. It's come out quite nice actually! Let's try another type of flower that grows along a stem. I'm using a combination of mid yellow and rose this time, and I'm painting these simple press and drag strokes along the length of the stem. Maybe I can even just paint a thicker bunch with varying strokes...and draw the stem in the end. That's looking nice as well. So try out different things on your own as well, just to see how they turn out. I'm painting these saffron flowers next. I've taken my big round brush again for this one, and I'm mixing a white on it and then a touch of the violet. Giving these slow, simple strokes. You can see how the darker violet mixed with the white and gave that lighter tone anyway. So that's something to take note of. You also need to have an idea of the resulting color when the two or three colors that you use blend with each other. It usually works out fine when you use white in the combination. But you need to a bit more vary well using other colors, like complimentary colors, which may end up giving you muddy strokes if they blend too much. Which is why it's necessary to emphasize that with this technique, the goal is to get the individual colors on your brush strokes and not the blended mix of them. So keep washing your brush and reloading it whenever you see that the colors are starting to mix up too much. Coming back to the saffron flower, I've also added these little yellow stigma, and I'm very happy with how that's turned out. And now I'm just going to try out a few random strokes with my flat brush. I'm using the size one flat brush, doing a bunch of strokes in viridian green and white. I'm using the thinner side of the brush to get these triangular shaped strokes. Now I'm making another bunch using yellow and red. Okay, I didn't wash my brush thoroughly enough, And you can see that the strokes are a little muddy because of that little bit of green still left on it. And honestly, it's time to change my water as well, but I'm just pushing on because this is just a practice session. But guys, please wash your brushes and use clean water always! Don't be lazy like me. Now I'm just trying out a few more strokes, and flowers. You know you can even use this technique with leaves. Here I'm just using a combination of viridian and yellow green to get these dual colored leaves. Trying out a few different strokes. All right, that's the third technique we learned in this class and my favorite of the three. It's really a lot of fun. And there's a certain level of suspense to this technique because you don't really know how exactly your strokes are going to turn out, and I find that exciting. So give this technique a try as well. Paint with different colors, different brushes. Try to paint different types of flowers. And again, have a lot of fun experimenting. And with that, we have completed all the techniques. And now it's about time we painted our wildflower garden, don't you think? So let's get on with that in the next video. 9. Wildflower Garden Painting Part 1: It's finally time to paint our wildflower garden, and by now, I hope you're feeling a little more comfortable painting with gouache and excited to start your class project. We'll be painting the garden in three stages. First we'll paint the background sky, which is a soft gradient of blue. Then we'll block in the green. Then in the third stage, we'll paint all the flowers. Let's start with the blue background. Now you did this in the blending exercise so you've already got a bit of a practice for this. The only difference here is that we'll be working from a lighter blue to a darker blue. So I'm mixing Cerulean blue with a lot of white. Need to mix up a good quantity of paint. Oh, I'm using my number six brush, as you can see. And just starting from the top, and then slowly moving down in horizontal strokes. So after painting a strip of roughly an inch thickness, I'm adding a little bit more blue to the mixture and blending that in. And I paint downwards for maybe another inch more. You don't have to stick to an absolute thickness of an inch. In fact, it's better if it's varied and organic. I'm just trying to be as clear and specific in my instructions for you to follow along. So just like the blending exercise, I keep adding blue to the mixture as I move down, blending each layer with back and forth brush strokes. I'm painting the blue a little here because it's all going to be green after this. So I'm washing my brush and mixing up some more of the lightest blue shade and running it along, trying to smooth out that area. Now here I'm actually going to pull down some of that lighter blue over the darker areas because I want to get a mildly streaky effect to make them look like clouds. I'm not applying a lot of paint, just taking an extremely little amount. My brush is almost dry here and I'm just running my brush very lightly over the sky. Okay. I'm stopping now because I don't want to overdo it. All right, we've painted the sky and with that, we've completed step one. Now we have to wait till the blue is completely dry before we can start with the green. That's because we'll be layering a little bit of the green on the blue area as well. Okay, so the blue paint is fully dry and we can start with the green. Now we'll need three tones of green - light, mid tone and dark green. I'm using sap green for the mid tone, yellow green for the highlights. And I'll mix up some dark green using sap green and Prussian blue. As for the brush, I'm using my size nine round brush. Now, we're not going to follow any specific rules of shading or highlights here, but generally you'd observe the green on trees and bushes getting darker from top to bottom because the top gets more direct sunlight. That's how we'll paint the green as well. I'm starting at the bottom of the dark green I mixed using sap green and Prussian blue. I'm applying the paint in random, uneven strokes and not really sticking to one particular direction to make it look more organic and natural. I actually want the green to be darker, so mixing that and applying it. And now I'm adding more of the sap green and blending that with the dark green using the same messy strokes and I'm working my way up. I don't stop exactly where the blue ends. In fact, I paint a little bit over the blue and make it a very uneven boundary. I'm also adding a little patch of dark green there and blending that up because I don't want the green patch to look like a rigid gradient. Next step is to give these grass like strokes. The idea is to just cover up that border line between the blue and green with lots of these grassy strokes. And try to vary the length, direction, and thickness of these strokes to make them look more natural. Now I want to paint a few double toned leaves going upwards, sort of like those taller grass with the bigger leaves. For that, I'm loading my brush with sap green as the base color and dipping the tip in dark green, and painting these leaves on the left. I just realized a thinner brush would be better so I'm switching to my number five round brush. Loading that up, and painting a combination of leaves and thin stems. Next I'm adding a few leaf strokes in dark green here and there, mostly sticking to the top part of the green patch. We'll be covering up the lower area, mostly with flowers. After that, I'm painting a few grass like strokes with the light green as well to add some highlights. You can be quite random with this. Maybe even give a few further down, here and there as well. And we just completed step two. Next comes our last and my favorite step, adding the flowers. But got to wait a little bit for the green to dry. Don't worry. You know, it won't be a long wait because gouache dries pretty fast! 10. Wildflower Garden Painting Part 2: The green patch is completely dry as well, And it's time to fill this garden up with wild flowers. But before we start painting, let's talk about the composition. Now how do we decide what kind of flowers to paint, what color, how to distribute them around, et cetera? Well, I usually just make these decisions as I paint. It's pretty intuitive and I don't follow any particular rule or order. I just paint different flowers in bunches and sometimes quite randomly. But if you do need some help with inspiration, you can have a look through Pinterest just to get an idea how wildflower gardens usually look like. I've already created a Pinter board for you with a few images that you can have a look through. You can get the link to the board in the class description. So the first thing I notice when I go through these images is that there's quite a different variety of flowers. Different flowers of of different colors. And the second thing is that they grow in bunches here and there. And these bunches are very organically spread, like you can see this bunch of lilac color flowers here. And then another bunch of the same over here. And these yellow flowers are growing in bunches here and there. And let's see...in this image as well, the bunches are very spread out. There's a bunch of wild flowers here, and then some yellow flowers, and the blue flowers are just scattered around. So that's pretty much what you need to take away from these reference images and apply to your own wildflower garden. I've put a few colors I want to paint my flowers in on my palette. I'm using bright colors like yellows, reds, blues, rose, violet, mauve, and white. And I'm starting with the white and yellow flower bunch here. I'm using my size one round brush and using the one stroke technique to dab, dab, dab and make a bunch that's shape of an inverted bunch of grapes. Now painting another bunch down here, and a fourth one here. Now let's see. I'm using my size nine round brush and painting some of these flowers in mauve and white. And I want to paint buds instead of flowers as I go up, So I'm just giving these single strokes instead of two. Now, adding a few more flowers down here, because I want the bunch a bit more spread out. You can also have overlapping flowers by the way. We saw in the Pinterest images that bunches of the same flower type can be found here and there, So I'm repeating the same bunch of flowers on this side as well. Now I want to bring in some blue to my composition. So I'm going to paint some in ultramarine blue and white. I'm actually spreading this white out a little on my palette so that it's easier to take with the tip of my brush. And speaking of brush, you can see that I've taken my small round brush to paint these flowers. Don't hesitate to keep switching your brushes as you paint different flowers. You'll be able to paint a lot more variety of flowers with different brushes. So I'm painting these little blue white flowers right in the middle here. And don't forget to load your brush with more paint when necessary. Okay, I think I should stop with the blue now. All right. Now, how about some rose color in there? Yep, I'm definitely feeling like rose so I'm giving a few simple ones here. And a bunch about here as well. Time to add some mid yellow to the painting. I think I'll paint a few flowers in mid yellow and red. Taking my size one flat brush and loading that up with yellow and a little bit of crimson and dabbing in some flowers using the thinner side of the brush. Oh, I like how that's coming out. And like I said earlier, don't be afraid to paint over some older flowers. Give a few flowers scattered as well. Now I'm painting some flowers of the same shape but using blue and violet over here. So I'm painting different bunches of flowers here and there, spreading out the different types and colors here and there. I'm deciding what colors to use and what kind of flowers to paint as I go. You don't really have to paint the exact same flowers or even stick to the same composition as this painting. I give you full freedom to explore your own creativity. In fact, I'd love to see something you've created on your own. So please don't stress about making your wildflower garden look like mine. There are so many different ways you can combine the flowers. So many different types of flowers and different color combinations you can use. All right. I'm painting a few red berries here and there, just to add to the pop of colors. That's looking good. Though I feel like there could be a bit more of highlights, so I'm painting in a few smaller flowers with white as a prominent color here and there. More like fillers. These are those odd little flowers that stray away from their bunch and grow along with another group of flowers. I'm also making the berries a little bigger to make them more prominent. And adding a few more red flowers as fillers wherever I feel there's too much open space between the flowers. And I think we're done. I'm pretty happy with the flowers. Now, the very last step of this painting is adding some green highlights here and there. I'm giving a few strokes of this yellow green with my size five round brush. I'm painting some thin lines and grass like leaves, very randomly to make it look like they're growing outwards in between the flowers. I'm also adding in a few strokes in the mid green, and the darker green. This process is also very random. I'm just painting random strokes here and there. I know I said the leaves are the last step, but I feel like there needs to be a bit more of these light yellow flowers So I'm painting in a few more. Okay, I'm going to stop now because I'm very much in danger of overdoing it. All right, now our wildflower garden painting is complete. And it's time to do the most satisfying thing ever, which is peel off the masking tape. And there you have it! A vibrant wild flower garden that's popping with color. 11. Conclusion: A big congratulations on finishing the class. I'm so happy to see you till the end. Through this class, I've shared with you everything that I know about, gouache and painting with it. We went through multiple lessons covering the various qualities of quash, including a comparison of its properties with watercolors and acrylics. Then we did some exercises like making the swatch chart and playing with different consistencies to get a deeper understanding of working with this wonderful medium. And then, we explored three different techniques of painting with gouache - layering, blending, and one stroke painting, before finally painting our wildflower garden. I hope all these little exercises and experiments helped you get to know gouache a lot better, and maybe like it a little more. If you need help somewhere along the class, all you need to do is ask me a question in the discussion panel and I'll be happy to answer them for you. Once you finish your work, please upload them to the student gallery as I would love to have a look at it and give you feedback. And while you're at it, throw in some experiment pictures as well. It'll be great for me and the other students to get an insight into your painting process. If you post your work on Instagram, do tag me @the_artsychoke so that I can repost it. I take great pleasure in showing off my student's work. And of course, do tag Skillshare. I would really appreciate it if you can take a moment to leave a review for this class. Feedbacks are always welcome and will help me make better classes for you as well. You can follow me here on Skillshare to get updates about any classes that I release or announcements that I make. You can do this by clicking the Follow button next to my name under the class title. And if you're interested, do check out my other classes. You'll find them all on my Skillshare profile. Thank you so much for taking this class and I'm looking forward to seeing your completed work. See you again soon. Take care. 12. Quick Update!: Hi again. I just wanted to update you guys on a new development. I am now offering 1-on-1 sessions. 1-on-1 sessions are great because they let you have a more focused, responsive and personalized learning experience. Pre-recorded classes are great, but sometimes they lack that personalized touch which can make all the difference in your learning journey. In a 1-on-1 one session, the focus is entirely on you, your strengths, your goals, and your areas of improvement. Every minute of the session is dedicated to your unique needs, and I'll be able to give you immediate guidance and feedback as and when required. I offer two different sessions. One is a 15 minute feedback session for any of my classes on Skillshare. So if you enjoyed this class and need a personalized feedback or need a little bit more help somewhere along the class, you can book a 1-on-1 session with me. You can show me your progress or ask me questions regarding the class and I'll help you out. The second session is a 30 minute session on finding inspiration for drawing botanicals. Over the 30 minutes, I will list and explain eight places to look for inspiration while drawing botanicals for your illustrations or patterns. Unlike pre- recorded classes or other online courses which follow a one size fits all approach, 1-on-1 sessions can be personalized to your specific needs and learning pace. To book a 1-on-1 session with me, just go to my Skillshare profile page. It's really an investment in your creative journey and I hope I can help you and guide you through that.