Modern Gouache Made Easy: Create Beautiful Botanical Paintings

1. What to Expect: Have you been meaning to start painting with gouache, but you just don't know how to get started? Or maybe you've tried the medium out and you've struggled with the consistency or the layering or the colour mixing. This class is going to change all of that. Hello there. My name is Shivani, and I'm a gouache artist and surface pattern designer based in the Sunny city of Chennai in the South of India. Through this class, we're going to paint this beautiful bird and botanical composition together. And as we go through all of that, I'm going to teach you all the basics of gouache that are going to help you master the medium, even if you're a complete beginner. We'll discuss color mixing with a limited palette. We'll discuss gouache consistency and how to get it nice and creamy and opaque. So you get this beautiful flat graphic style, and we'll talk about layering. Most importantly, we're going to have fun and we're going to create this beautiful painting at the end of this class. I cannot wait to take you through all of it, so let's jump straight into it. 2. The Class Project: For this class project, we're going to work together to create this beautiful, modern botanical composition with birds. I'll be taking you through all of the steps, so it's simple and easy to follow. This painting is a lot of fun. It's very forgiving and 100% achievable even by beginners. And there are no rules. By the end of the class, you'll have this complete painting that's ready to frame and hang up at home. Through the class, I'll be teaching you three core techniques that are going to make you a very confident gouache painter. We'll talk about perfecting gouache consistency. We'll talk about layering like a Pro, and we'll talk about achieving color harmony with a limited color palette, which means that you don't need to go out and buy new paints every time you want a new color. You're going to have the skills to mix up any color that you want with just a few tubes of paint. In the next lesson, we'll talk about the materials you need and we'll start setting up to create this project. 3. Materials & Setup: Gouache most commonly comes in tubes, but sometimes you also get gouache in tubs or cups, for example, Himi Miya gouache. For this class, I'm going to be using tubes, but you can use whatever you have on hand. Gouache also comes in either artist grade or student grade. Again, you can use whatever you have but if you're picking up fresh paints, I would highly recommend artists grade gouache because gouache is one of the mediums where the quality of the paints really makes a huge difference. The other materials with gouache are a lot more forgiving, for example, the paper or the brushes, but a lot of beginner challenges get solved with just having the right paints. However, that being said, even if you're picking up artist grade paints, you should keep in mind that you really don't need a large set of colors. One of my favorite things about gouache is that you can mix up so many colors. The paints are highly pigmented and lend themselves really well to color mixing. So even with just a set of primary colors, along with white and black, you can achieve a whole range of colors, which is one of the things we'll be talking about in one of the next lessons. For this project, as well, we're going to use just the primary colors. We'll need a shade of blue, a shade of yellow, a shade of red and black and white. If you're picking up artists grade gouache, I'd highly recommend Winsor and Newton, or Holbein. Those are my two favorite brands to work with. Next, you'll need your brushes. Like I said, gouache is very forgiving when it comes to the brushes, so try to use whatever you already have available. For the project, we're going to need one slightly larger sized brush and one smaller sized brush. So maybe a size four or six and a size one or two for the fine details. For the smaller brush, try to find one that comes to a fine tip. Synthetic brushes are perfectly fine. You do not need natural hair brushes. Natural hair brushes tend to work better with watercolor because they hold a lot more water. But with gouache, that's actually not a great thing. We don't want the brush holding too much water because we want more control on the opacity of the paint. So synthetic brushes work perfectly. And when it comes to the paper, again, work with what you have. You could either use a sheet of paper or a sketchbook. Try to pick one that's at least 250 GSM. I would recommend 300 GSM because you don't want the paper to buckle when you add more water. And you can pick either hot pressed or cold pressed, whatever you prefer working with. Cold pressed tends to have a little bit more texture and is a little bit more beginner friendly, whereas hot press is going to give you a much more smooth appearance. Finally, we'll need a few basics like a cup of water, a mixing palette. You can use one that's flat like this ceramic palette or you can use one with wells. Again, for beginners, I would recommend the one with wells so that you can keep your colors separate. Then you'll need either a piece of cloth or a paper towel for dabbing off excess water and paint from your brush. Need a pencil for making your sketch and an eraser. And finally a scrap piece of paper or a rough sketchbook for swatching your paints. Now that you have all of this ready, let's get started. 4. Let’s Talk Consistency: Consistency is the number one struggle most beginners face with gouache. If you get this one thing right, everything else just becomes easier, including layering. I'd like to start off by saying that there is no one consistency, and this is something I've said in my previous classes as well. However, I'd like to rephrase that. The consistency you're after depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve with your final painting. One of the amazing things about gouache is that it's so versatile. You can use it creamy and opaque, and you can get this really flat graphic style, which is what we're going to do in today's painting. However, at the same time, you can water it down quite a lot and use it similar to watercolors. And you can use it straight from the tube very thick and you can get some beautiful texture in your painting with dry brushing. All of these different consistencies have their place. When you learn to work with all of them and make intentional choices in your painting about what consistency you want, your paintings become so much more interesting. So let's start working with the paint, and I'll show you how to achieve the consistency that you're after. We're doing a simple exercise that's going to make it really easy to remember the different types of consistencies that can be achieved with gouache. So first I'm taking some red out from the tube. The color really doesn't matter. You can pick any color and I've dipped my paint brush into the water, but I'm also going to use my cloth to dab off any excess moisture from my brush because for the first consistency, which is going to be called the butter consistency, we want it to be fresh from the tube with hardly any water, practically no water, but just having a damp brush will make it easy to move the brush along. So I'm just picking up some of that paint, and I'm just going to swatch it here. And as you can see, it has this really nice dry brushing texture and you'll feel that it's a little hard to move the paint along the paper, and that's exactly how it's supposed to be. So that's our butter consistency. The next thing I'm going to do is just lightly dip my brush into the water. We're going to bring in just hardly a drop of water into the paint, and we're going to make it thinner and easier to move on the paper. I'm going to take just a little bit more because I feel my paint needs it. So what you're looking for is that the paint is easy to move along on the palette, but still doesn't feel too thin or too watery. And we'll paint that. And this is going to be our cream consistency. And now we're going to again, dip the bristles into water, bring in one large drop of water into this paint. If you feel you've made it too thin, you can always add in more paint again. And now, again, you're just looking for the paint to be a little easier to move around on your palette. And this time it feels a bit more translucent than the previous one. And we'll swatch that, and that is our milk consistency. And it's possible that you'll see a bit more streakiness as this one dries. And now, again, dip the paint, bring in a nice big drop of water, thin it down quite a bit. And then, as you can see, we're starting to get a lot more transparency now, and this is going to be our coffee consistency. And finally, we're going to take a lot of water, hardly any paint. Just mainly water on your brush and very little paint, and this is going to be a lot more transparent, a lot more watercolor like. And this is our tea consistency. So to recap, we've got butter, which is really thick and very dry on the brush. Then we've got cream, which is smooth and very opaque. Then we've got milk, which is, again, very smooth to work with, but it's got a bit more transparency. It might be hard to see in this red color, but depending on the color you work with, and as it dries, you'll see a bit more of the translucent nature. And then we have it more watered down and it's coffee. And here you can see the white of the paper through it. And finally, we have tea. This is just an easy way to practice the different consistencies you can achieve with gouache and show you how versatile it is. You can, of course, water it down so much more as well like watercolor and get these really transparent washers of color, which is beautiful. So this is not all that's possible, but this just gives you a nice gradation. And for today's project, we're going to be working somewhere between the cream and milk consistency. Just make sure your paint is able to glide well onto the paper, but still is nice and opaque. 5. Limited Palette Philosophy: When you have every single color laid out in front of you, you tend to use them all. And as a result, the colors tend to clash with each other. You lack harmony. However, a limited palette solves that. If you have in front of you just one shade of red, one shade of blue, and one shade of yellow, you're forced to mix up every other color that you need. It's completely possible. Understanding a little bit of colour theory is going to help you a lot with that. I'll be teaching you everything you need to know to paint today's project, but if you're interested in going deeper with colour theory, you can check out my other class on the topic. I'll link it in the description. When you work with a limited palette, it becomes pretty impossible to create colors that don't match with each other. The painting we're going to create today is going to use multiple different shades of color, but they're all coming from the same three or four tubes of paint that are mixed in different proportions to get the colors we're after. That makes the colors look intentional, and it makes the entire painting look harmonious. Let's do a few color mixing exercises to understand how this works. On my palette here, I have laid out a yellow, red, and a blue. The shades really don't matter. You can use any of the three primaries that you have on hand. So we're going to first just swatch these three colors. That's the red. And I've got this ultramarine blue. Now we'll start mixing colors using just these three colors. It doesn't matter what ratios you're using. We just want to explore the possibilities of colors that we can get using just three. I'm starting by mixing the secondary colors. And then the red, along with the blue to make a purple. With the secondary colors itself, you can start seeing so much of variation. So in the same purple, if you add more blue, you're going to get a very different shade. And if you add more red, again, you're going to get a different shade. And so right there itself, we've created a lot of variation. And finally, we'll do the blue with yellow as our third secondary color, which is green. And for this demonstration, you can see, I don't care too much if I'm muddying up these base colors because it is a mixing exercise after all. So that's the green. And similarly, just by varying the amount of the primary color mixed into it, you're going to get so many different variations of green itself. And now we can start making slightly more complex colors by mixing all three primaries in. So let's say I take the blue. I already had a bit of yellow on my brush, so a bit of that mixed in, but I'm taking more and a bit more blue. I'll swatch this as well because this is a nice, very cool green. And then I could take a bit of the red into it, and that's way more red than I was intending to add in. So I'll go back in with some more of the blue and yellow. And here I've got, like, a really nice, dark brown which if I add white into that, I'm going to get a lovely gray. And when we're mixing complex shades like this is where the power of a limited palette really comes into play. So the gray here has so much depth to it, unlike a gray which would just be mixed with black and white. It has some color in it, and that makes it so interesting. And like I said, it starts becoming harmonious with all the other colors. It's pretty impossible to go wrong when you're mixing with just three colors, no matter what you mix it's just going to work within that same palette. So I'm going to take some of this gray white, and this is how I love playing with color. I just start mixing them into each other to see what happy accidents happen. So by taking that neutral color in there, I'm getting, like, a more coral peach-ish shade, which is not very saturated. And that's another thing. When you start mixing with all three primaries, you're going to get very natural looking colors that aren't overly saturated, and they just give a beautiful color palette to your painting. This was just a small demonstration for you to understand how this would work. We're going to mix up all the colors we need for our final project using the same three shades, but feel free to play around more in this color exercise and click a photo of it, upload it to the project gallery because color mixing is one of my favorite things, and I love seeing what my students come up with. 6. Painting With Gouache: When you're painting with gouache, you want to make sure that you mix up enough of a particular colour on your palette before you take it into your final painting. If you run out of paint midway, it's pretty impossible to mix the same color again. Let's say I wanted to paint this particular color here. I start painting it, and then because I'm running out of paint on my palette, as you can see, I keep dipping into the water, and I try to spread the paint, which is fine if you're after a watery consistency, but if you're trying to get it to look thick, this is going to be a problem because you're just going to get an inconsistent application, and parts of your painting are going to look streaky because you just had to water it down because you ran out of paint. So you're going to have thicker areas and thinner areas, and that's just not going to give you the nice flat application that we're after. This is where having a palette with wells becomes really handy because you can mix the right quantity of color that you need and make sure you're able to cover all the areas of your painting that require that color. Compare that with the next rectangle I paint where we're going to have enough paint in our palette, and we're going to load the paintbrush with that right creamy consistency because we want the flat application. You can see that I'm smoothly able to drag my paintbrush across the paper, and I don't need to add more water in because I'm confident that I have enough on my palette and I'm not going to run out of paint. So I'm able to get this nice, opaque and creamy application without the inconsistency and streakiness of the previous one. Another thing you'll want to note about gouache is that it can appear streaky while it's drying, even though it's not actually streaky. It's just because of different drying times of different parts of your painting. So this while it's wet looks like it has a bit of streakiness, but make sure you don't keep applying paint over that. Just let it be and allow it to dry. If after it dries, you still feel that it looks streaky, then you can always go in with a second layer. With gouache, keep in mind that all colors tend to appear a bit different when they dry. So this is a dry swatch of paint, and I'm applying the same colour wet here, and you can see that it tends to look a bit lighter when it's wet. And generally with gouache, all the light colors appear darker when they dry and dark colors appear lighter when they dry. So that's something to keep in mind. And that's why I like to swatch my paints before I bring them into my final painting so that I make sure I get the color that I'm actually after. One really great thing about gouache is that you can layer either light on dark or dark on light. This makes the paint really versatile. We'll discuss layering a bit more in the next lesson. 7. Layering Your Paint & Brush Control: Gouache is a water based medium that re-wets completely when it's dry. Now, one of the things I love that is because I can store colors on my palette just like this, even after I finish working with them, and I can just rewet them and reactivate them whenever I want that color, again, which is what I'm doing right now just by adding some water in. But what this means when you're practically working with the paint is that if you try to layer on wet paint, you're going to create a bit of a mess because you will reactivate the base layer and the colors will blend together. Right now I'm painting a wet swatch of paint, and let's see what happens if I try layering over that. I'm going in with the top layer, and as you can see, the colors are just completely blending together and creating a mess. The color is flowing into the bottom layer, and that's not at all what we want. So instead, I'm going to paint the layer on this dry swatch of paint. As you can see, this has now completely dry. So let's paint over that and look at the difference. Again, I'm just going to do a line. Look how clean that layer is in comparison. So with gouache, when you're layering, which is going to be a core technique that we use in today's project, you want to make sure that your base layers are completely dry and then go in with your top layer. Let's also talk about brush control. So in this project, we're going to be doing layers with some fine details. So you want to be able to bring your brush to a fine tip to be able to do that. And a little practice will go a long way. So get some color onto your brush and try to create some short lines using just the tip of your brush. You can even try some dots dashes and other textures, which would be beautiful little details that we add in today's project. When you're doing this, you want to make sure that your strokes are confident and quick. You don't want to go back and forth too much when you're doing it because, again, you could end up reactivating your base layer and blending the colors together. So again, if I were to go over this base layer, but I'm doing these hesitating strokes and going back and forth, you can see that I'm picking up some of the base color and they're blending together, which is not what we want when we're looking for clean layers. So make sure your strokes are quick and confident. 8. Sketching Botanicals: The next thing we'll be doing is working on the sketch for our final project. I'm providing my entire sketch in the class resources as a downloadable, so you can print it out and trace it if you'd like to. But if instead you'd like to make the sketch on your own, this exercise is going to be helpful. For this class project, we're looking for simple botanical shapes. We're not looking for perfection. We're not looking for anything too detailed or hyper realistic. We just want to create fun botanical and floral shapes. And of course, we'll be doing the birds as well, which you can refer to in the download I've provided. For the florals, let's sketch a few simple floral shapes for practice. Your final project could look exactly like mine, or you can create a composition completely of your own. It's up to you. So here's one of the simple floral shapes that I enjoy. We first create a stem and then this elongated C shape and then a little bit of waviness on the top, and then we can have a few of these stamens with buds coming out. Then we can create this simple doodly floral with wavy edges. Then we could have this five petal floral shape. We could do berries. Here's another one I love, so we'll create the stem. We create a C shape, and again, the waves, and then we can create five petals coming out of here. Another similar one you could try is create the stem, and then you have three petal shapes like this and you can add in two more between these. This way, you can do two different colors here and it looks really interesting. Then you could have one that looks like this. And then you could have some simple, leafy shapes. You could even add leaves to some of your florals or you could try large stems with multiple leaves. So go ahead and practice all of these different shapes. All of these are just so beginner friendly and also a lot of fun to play with. In the next lesson, we'll start putting all of this together and creating our final project. 9. Project Part 1: Sketching: First thing we need to do for the final project is to get our sketch ready. Mine is semi finished here. I'm going to fill all of this together with you. As you can see, I've given it a 1 centimeter border on all sides. This is just a guideline so that I make sure that all my elements are within that. And I also have some elements touching the edges so that it forms a nice, consistent edge all over. So let's start filling in a few more elements here. We could use any of the floral shapes we discussed or whatever else you'd like to add in. I'm also going to add in things like a butterfly, when you're working on your sketch, try to keep it quite light so that you're able to erase the pencil lines later on, and it doesn't show through your painting too much. I try not to press down into the paper too deeply. Use a mix of smaller florals and larger florals and other elements because that just makes your composition look a lot more interesting rather than having everything of the same size. When you have variation, then you're guiding the viewer on what your more important elements are and what your supporting elements are. You can have small little wobbly shapes like this for flowers, which are great filler elements as well. And then you can have larger versions of those. I like these wavy leaf shapes as well. And that's just a stem with two leaves. Try not to make your composition too cluttered, but also not leave any awkward empty spaces. You can have these little flowers with multiple petals, sort of like a daisy. I generally tend to sketch with a 2H pencil because it's a lot lighter than a traditional HB pencil. And like I said, it allows me to erase my pencil marks later on very easily. Anytime you find a space looking too empty, you could add in some small details there so that you fill it out, but make sure you don't make it look too cluttered. You still want a lot of breathing room between the different elements in your composition. So I'm happy with that, and the final thing I will do is I will lightly erase all of my pencil lines so that it's very light - just enough for me to be able to see it. And that way I'm not going to have any pencil lines showing through the paint by mistake. So I just very lightly over it with my eraser and when I do this, I need to make sure that all of the lines and details are still visible to me, just a lot lighter. I dusted that off, and that's perfect. Now we're ready to start painting. 10. Project Part 2: Yellow, Peach and Red: And now it's time to start painting. So we've got our sketch here, we've got the water. We've got our palette. I've also got this piece of paper in case I want to swatch any of my colors. One thing I like to do sometimes before I paint a composition is I like to do a rough sketch in my sketchbook, and as you can see, I've just blocked out all the colors with color pencils just to get an idea of the distribution of colors that I might want in my final painting. So I'm just keeping this on the side as a guide. But you can just follow from my painting. And like I said, my final sketch is uploaded in the class resources. So if you'd like to take a print out of that, use to guide your own sketch, you can do that. How I like to work in this kind of a painting is to go color by color. So I'm going to first mix one color and try to paint it in all the different places that I might want it, at least as the first layer. I might use that same color for layering later on, so I always make sure I save up enough on my palette. But as a first step, I do this so that, again, I know where the colors are going to lie, and I can distribute it across my painting so that we don't have too much of one color in one area and then not enough of it across the entire painting. We want all the colors to be spread out evenly across this painting. So let's start with one of the simplest colors that we're going to mix, which is this yellow. So I'm taking my lemon yellow out in the palette, and I'm also going to keep some white handy. I'll keep it here in the center of the palette and I'm going to take out some of my red, which is my carmine. I'm obviously not going to use this much red, but I will take a touch of it into my yellow because like I told you earlier, I like to have all the colors sort of blended from the same base hues, and I'm just mixing them together. I already feel like I have probably added in a bit too much red because this has become more orange than what I wanted. So I'm going to bring in some more yellow, and I'm also going to pick up some white and add it in. I don't care too much about keeping my white pure because I'm perfectly okay with picking up a bit of that yellow when I'm mixing other colors. This is what brings the color harmony as well into the painting. I want it to be a lot lighter, so I've picked up a lot more white, and I'm quite happy with that color, but I'll add in some water. So you want it to be of that nice, creamy, smooth consistency, so you can spread it easily. But at the same time, it's not too watery and doesn't end up looking like watercolor. And I'm going to swatch the color right here to see if I'm happy with it. I really like that. So just adding a bit more water. Now I'm quite happy with the quantity of the color on my palette as well. So I'm going to start painting that. I'm going to paint the body of the two birds first because that is my largest usage of this yellow. Try to get a nice smooth application, nice and opaque. And anytime your paint ends up feeling too dry on your brush or on your palette, you can just dip the tip of your brush into water. Don't add in too much water. And I'm happy with that. Next, I'll do the body of this one. Next, I'm going to fill out just a few flowers here and there. There's no exact science to this. You don't have to put your yellow in exactly the same flowers that I'm putting it. You can go as per your own intuition and paint yours how you want to. So let's go ahead and paint more yellow. Remember that this is just our base layer. We're going to be adding in details over the top of these with other colors so you don't need to be too detailed right now. And make sure you have enough paint stored on your palette so we can come back to it later. Great. I'm happy with the distribution of the yellow across my painting, so I'm going to next mix a peach. For this, I'm going to be using this red. Now that I've filled a few areas with the deeper red, I'm next going to go in with this more orangey peach. Remember that if your gouache dries on the palette, you can always just add some water and reactivate it. 11. Project Part 3: Purple and Blue: Let's now mix up a beautiful purple shade. We'll be using the ultramarine blue along with the red, as I said before, always start with a little less of the base hue because they tend to overpower and it becomes harder to lighten the color. You can always add more of the base hue if you need to. But if you make it too dark, it becomes really hard to lighten it. We have some of the red, some of the ultramarine blue, and a bit of white, and I'm just mixing all of it together. You can see it's forming a nice violet shade. You can decide how you want your violet to look. This is a bit more of a reddish shade. I'm probably going to adjust it to be a bit more blue, and I want it lighter. The final floral shade we'll be mixing is going to be a blue, and that's going to be a bit on the darker side. So I want a good balance of light and dark colors across the composition. So I'll add a bit more blue into this and some white. Add some water and mix that all up. Now, this is looking a lot closer to what I want. This is a more bluish purple shade, but I'm going to add a bit more white again. I'd like to have it lighter. Let's mix that up. Add some water in. Give it a good mix, and let's swatch it. I really like that, so I'm going to start painting. Make sure you leave a few gaps in the florals because we'll be adding in blue as well. As I'm looking at my composition, I feel I want to add some red in here just for some balance, so I'm going to go back and pick up my red after making sure I rinse my brush thoroughly and the red is a little dry on my palette, so I'm going to bring in some water to reactivate it and make it creamy. And then I can paint it here. You can always go back and bring in any of the previous colors as long as you make sure you leave enough on your palette. Perfect. I'm going to start with the blue and after I fill the blues where I want them, I will then add in more of these colors where I want to. For the blue, we're going to take our ultramarine blue, some white, and let's start by mixing that. We're going for a slightly darker shade here so we don't want too much of white. Now if we just leave our blue as it is, you can see how it really stands out and looks too bright compared to the rest of the palette, which is a bit more subdued. So to have a similar effect, we would want to add a bit of the complimentary color of blue in, which is orange. I already have an orange mixed with our palette here. I'm going to just dip a little bit of that and bring it in. You can see I added too much orange, so it's become very gray and that's what the complimentary color tends to do. It desaturates the base hue. We'll add more blue back in. And some water, mix that up. This is quite a beautiful, nice, desaturated, earthy blue. I like it, but I'd like it to be a bit brighter than that. So again, just going to add a bit more blue, but I don't want it going too dark, so I'll add some white as well. If you notice, I never use colors straight from the tube. Because I prefer to mix everything from scratch, even if I need a blue or a red. I'm not just taking blue or red from the tube, even yellow for that matter. I'm using all of these hues to mix all the colors, and they just look so beautiful together. That's better now. I think I like that a lot more. It's brighter. The difference might be very subtle, but it makes an impact on your painting. I'm going to take that in and the first and most important place where I want to use this blue is on the bird. So I'll start with that. Make sure you mix up enough blue because you're going to need it for the wings of the bird. For the wings of the bird, don't overthink it. Just use your brush to make these marks. You don't need to paint in the shape of each feather so perfectly. Just use your brush to make these beautiful marks. I'll just take a line across the top of the wing. We'll be adding a lighter shade of blue here. I'll just leave it that way for now and I'll add some in the tail and some on the face. So all the parts of the face that we did not fill with the peach are going to be blue. And you can even cover the eye. It's fine. We'll go over it with another layer. That's it. The blue for this bird is done and we'll start the next bird. I'm just going to turn my paper a bit so it's easier for me. And the tail. And again, the face. Before we proceed, I'll just finish the wings of the bird. I'm going to take a bit of this blue aside and add a lot more white into it. We'll get a lighter shade of the same color and you brush in some water, mix that up. Honestly, I feel like I can go a lot lighter than that because if I use the color as this is, when it dries, you'll notice that there's not that much of a difference between the two. I'll go one shade further, mix that up. Perfect. This is going to be a lot lighter and will provide better contrast. So let's fill that into the inner part of the wing. You'll know your brush is too dry when you get dry strokes like this, so then you can dip in water. And we'll do the same for this bird. We're not yet starting any of the layering, but while we're at it, we could add a nice light stroke on the wing just to add some detail. This is where the creamy consistency becomes really important because if it's too thin, it's just going to dry transparent. Now let's proceed with the flowers, and we'll use this blue to fill in some of them. You could even use the light blue in a few places if you'd like to. Working on one color at a time like this gives us enough opportunity for all of our base layers to completely dry before we start adding the detailing over them. This is the point where you can step back and see if you'd like to repeat any of the colors. We still have all of our greens to fill in, so I'm going to finish doing that before I decide if I'd like to repeat any of these colors because I'd like to see how the colors look together. Let's now move on to the greens. 12. Project Part 4: Greens: We'll be using roughly two shades of green just to have some variation. Let's again take some blue. I'm going to use the yellow that we've already mixed because I have enough of it on my palette. I'm just going to pick up some of that and mix it with the blue, and this is going to be our starting point for the green. If I mixed it with the yellow from the tube, the green would have been a lot brighter and saturated. I think I'm going to add a bit more of the yellow and also a touch of red. When you're adding red, just touch the tip of the brush and bring it in because you can add too much very easily. The red again, acts as a complimentary color and it's going to help desaturate the green further, and so you get this more early olive tone. But I want something a bit brighter than that, so going to go in again with some blue. I really like that, but I want it to be lighter, so I'll add some white. Here we've got a nice earthy cool green, you can swatch it here. It's almost like a sage green, and I'm happy with that. So when you're filling in some of the finer details, use the tip of your brush and if you're finding it hard, you can always move to a smaller brush size. With the greens, I like to not keep it static in the sense that I like to keep varying the shade a little bit, so I could have one that's a bit more light by adding in a bit more white into it. I'll just have some white here on my palette and I can just keep varying the shade as I go. I feel that gives a much better look than just having one single green. Even though it's deriving from the same color, there are small variations at different parts of the painting. You can even paint in some of the stems of these berries. Now, let's also mix up the second shade of green so that we have both of them handy as we work across it and we can distribute them as we want to. So for this, I'm just adding a tad more yellow and a bit more blue. I'll mix those up and see how they look. This is a good base. Like you can see, it's more saturated and more grassy. So I'll add some white into that because I want this to be a lot lighter than the previous green. Perfect. I think that looks good, and it adds some brightness, but I do know that it's going to dry a little bit darker than how it appears right now. So again, go to add in a bit more white. This looks great. So let's start painting. If you want even more variation, you could create a mix between these two greens, and that'll give you another different shade that still works. I'm now done with all of my greens. I have a few spots of florals and berries left to fill in. So I'm going to look at the composition and see what colors I want to use. Once that's done, we'll move on to mixing a brown for some of the details like the butterflies and finally, we'll start layering. 13. Project Part 5: Layers & Final Details: So I filled out all of my flowers. The next thing we're going to do is mix up a dark brown for some final details like the eye, the center of the butterfly. So for that, I'm going to finally use this tube of black. And I'll mix a bit of our red into it. Again, to keep the entire palette just very harmonious. We don't want to use black straight from the tube because that's going to look very harsh compared to everything else. So you could add a bit of this red. You could add a bit of yellow. And what you'll end up with is a brown that works with the entire palette. And it's almost black. In fact, I think it can be lightened further. So I'll add a bit of yellow into it. I like that. It's more grayish now, and you're not going to need too much of this, so you don't have to mix up too much on your palette. You'll just add in the center of the butterfly, the antennae, and we'll add the details of the bee as well. Finally, we'll do the beak and the eye. You want to be really careful when you're doing this. Again, if you're more comfortable, you could use a smaller brush. Perfect. Now it's time for all the final details that are going to bring this painting to life. For the greens, you could add a bit of contrast in the center and the veins of the leaves. You could do this using the alternating shade of green or even some yellow. You don't need to do this everywhere, but you can do it in a few places just to add some interest. The next thing I will do is add some detailing on the body of the bird. So on the yellow, I'm going to add some small strokes with blue. And just to add some more interest, I'm going to use the red and just add some strokes on the wings. We're not looking for any kind of perfection here. Imperfect is the beauty in these kinds of paintings. I'm just going to add a bit of yellow detailing on the back of the wing here. Then for the flowers, we're not looking for anything realistic, we're just going to do whatever feels right and feels fun and exciting. So think of any quirky combinations you'd like to and just go for it. You could use small strokes, lines, outlines, whatever you feel like, just keep reactivating the paint well on your palette if it dries out. And if any part of your painting feels too empty, feel free to add in just a few small floral details there. There is no perfect stopping point here. Your painting is ready whenever you feel it's complete. You can add as many or as few details as you'd like to. Okay, perfect. I'm really happy with how this looks, so I'm going to stop here, and you can check out my final project uploaded in the project gallery, and I love to see yours as well. So please do upload it there. I will be sure to provide my feedback. Once your painting is complete, give it some time and allow it to dry completely. As soon as that's done, we're going to do my favorite part, which is erasing all of the pencil lines and allowing the beauty of the painting to shine through. 14. Summing Up: Congratulations on making it to the end of this class and completing your gouache illustration. I hope you enjoyed painting it. Through the class, we learned three core techniques when it comes to working with gouache. We learned about the consistency and water control. We learned how to layer the paint without re wetting and lifting the base layer, and we learned how to create a harmonious composition with a limited color palette. If there are parts you struggled with, don't worry about it. It's okay if your painting doesn't look exactly like mine and if your colors look different, as well. The whole point of this was to learn about gouache as a medium and to have fun. If you have questions, please drop them in the discussion tab below, and I'll be happy to help you out. And once your project is complete, don't forget to click a photo and upload it to the project's gallery. I and all of the other students would love to see it and cheer you on. And it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review for the class and let me know what you thought. You enjoyed this class as a next step, I would highly recommend checking out my class about colour theory and color mixing, where we go into a lot more detail. Or if you're interested in learning how to paint birds, this class takes you through all of that. So thank you so much for being a part of this class, and I look forward to seeing you inside another one of my classes. Bye for now.