Much ado about Gouache

1. Introduction: Hi guys. I am so excited to be doing Scotia again. It's been a hot second, as you might know, if you've already been following me for a little while. My previous two tutorials were actually about sculpting, and the reason why it's been a little while since I've done one is I have been kind of taking a break from sculpting for the past, little while just focusing on other mediums, other interests giving my hands a break from sculpting. And so it kind of was holding me back from doing a tutorial. I'm sculpting cause I was really not inspired to, and I want to give you guys the best quality. If I'm inspired, then I know I'll give the best quality tutorial that I can. So then I had a light bulb moment that I don't have to do a tutorial on sculpting. I can do whatever is captivating my interest at the moment. Talk about it. Ah ha Moment. Me I got there. It only took me like six months. Anyways, today, what we're going to talk about is because that has seriously been my latest obsession. It's yeah, it's a problem. I love it so much. It's not a problem. Art is great. We don't need to worry about that anyways. Um, so, yeah, today's tutorial is going to be talking about what is quash. I'm gonna outline some some tips that I have found super helpful and kind of the basics to understand it. If you have a background in watercolor or acrylic, both of those mediums have different elements that are similar to wash. Uh, but there's a couple little learning curves that I would have found really helpful to know right from the beginning that I have kind of figured out now, Mind you, I'm still total nube, and I'm still figuring out as I go to, So let's let's go on the steering together. 2. Lets talk gouache: So what exactly is wash? You should probably start there. It's actually very similar toe watercolor. At the main difference is it's way more opaque than watercolor. Yeah, like straight out of the jute. If you were to take watercolor and wash, watercolor will be more translucent than wash. However, if you water it down, wash at because it is water soluble very much the same as watercolor. Uh, if you add enough water, it can actually be translucent it It can have the same effect as watercolor in that sense, but it will always dry Matt, where it's watercolor, depending on the brand and color and the pigments that are used in the binders. Sometimes conjour I glossy. So that's one big difference. A couple interesting things to know about. Quash is certain. Colors can dry, either lighter or darker than they appear wet. So it's always a good idea to swatch out new art supplies. But like wash is like integral. This is unavoidably important to watch it out, so you know what will be the end color. Don't go by the color that's on the tube. Don't go by the color that's coming out onto the paper do your swatches. It's worth it. Take the time. So you know what? The end product, the end dried product is gonna look like. In fact, for a first exercise, why don't you take a moment and do your swatches? 3. Examples of gouache: here are a couple of 60 minute color studies that I did in. Gosh, this one was actually 45. These two are 60 from Thor Ragnarok. The movie. I really had a lot of fun doing these, and I'm thinking this might be what my next tutorial is on because it was super fun doing these color studies. And I'm so happy that a friend of mine suggested doing these because it really encourage just training your mind to look at how colors affect the overall feel of the piece, which can translate beautifully into your own original paintings. Here is a print of my first wash painting. Well, not my 1st 1st but first committed one. I'll say I did a little moth before with no background. But this is my first committed wash painting of a tiger Lily that I super love. And then this is my most recent one, which is the finished product that you are going to be watching today, which is dandy lions. Just to show Good close up. Did you of these cuties? So I hope you enjoy watching my journey of painting this and I hope you have fun creating something beautiful as well 4. Supplies: the supplies I'll be using today is Kansan Excel Watercolor paper. Be using liquid Tex palette knife for mixing the colors on my palette. This is not necessary. I just find its helpful to keep from my brushes from getting saturated, and then he waste a bunch of paint and then you're trying to get it off. But then it groups on the page, and I found it useful. It's not necessary. I am using a combination of watercolor and acrylic brushes, actually, the brand's air. Princeton urge my escape, their Teza, and that's about it. I decided to go with acrylic brushes because wash is a bit heavier bodied and can beat up brushes really easy. So that's what I would with, of course, pencil. What I used for my palate is actually just a clear A from Staples. What was it you can keep, like diplomas in here or something? It's like a display, and you can use anything you want. You can use pallets like these if you want. I really like using the flat surface, though, because as you can see, you have a lot more room to work with. And since it is water activated, I like keeping it on the pellet through future projects. Or if you need more of that color, you can just reactivate it a little bit. So there is the and I will be using two brands of wash. Actually, this one is reefs, which is easy to access. Easy to get in Michael's and our Teza, which, uh, presently only ships really to the States and the UK. However, I did just notice on Amazon. Here in Canada, you can buy the smaller sets now, which is cool at 24 set is available on Amazon right now, a bit more pricey, but you know, that's to be expected for importing stuff. So, yes, these are the two that I will be using, but washes squash grabbed whatever is reasonably priced and accessible in your area. Another thing that I forgot to mention that I personally like doing. But again, it's not technically necessary. I just like using um tape to keep the borders very crisp and clean, and also to kind of help the page, not buckle. So personally, I have been using a frog tape with pretty great success and also this cute little washi tape. How cute is this. I need more washing tape. It makes me like to happy. It's It's too great anyways. So if you have some type of masking tape to help you, you can do that as well. But again, it's not necessary. So once you have all your supplies ready, you have your reference shot. You have done your initial pencil sketch. Next up, what's most important is to take a step back. Remind yourself again of your intention with this painting. Specifically, look at where you want the highlights in your painting. So if you want any pure whites personally, what I like to do is leave that part of the paper bear. Don't put any pains because you use White Wash so much. Okay, sir, I'm not gonna get emotional on that topic. I feel like every Goff said the white container should be seven times the size of all the other teams, but we're not going to go on that ranch today. It's going to be fine, So basically, I use white wash for mixing with colors that I want to be more past Ellard lighter and for tiny accents that would be too hard to keep bear paper. I have not experimented yet with using masking fluid. That might be an option with wash. I mean, I'm sure it is because it's water based still, and it won't be affected by it. Um, I personally have found the best, though in large areas that you want white. Keep it the paper clean, just bear paper. And then for tiny accents, I do use pure white wash. 5. Tips: as difficult as it is, you got to remember that even though it is water soluble like like water color, it is not the same his watercolor fight the urge toe add water to try and stretch it out. You're gonna burn through wash. It feels like shockingly outrageous how, how much you use on a painting, fight the urge toe Add water to make it stretch out because that will lower your A pass iti and will make it so it's hard to get beautiful washes, stolid, opaque areas. Just just catch You could do it, have faith in you And because color relativity just gonna throw that out there and not go further on it. Besides this, keep a piece of paper scrapping this paper first watches next to you can see up this side. There we go up here. I did some some colors right on the edge of the paper. Now the reason why it is so I could hold it right up against the painting that I was doing so I could see how those colors interacted. Now it's interesting that, you know, on this piece of paper, this looks green. But next to what I was doing it looked blue or some other color that I can't remember right now, anyways, so swash cards are not just for seeing what color your paint is gonna be when it's dry, but also when you're mixing new colors and you want to see how they're going to interact with your painting that you've already put down and painting on the edge toe, hold it next to your Your painting is like a great hack that I really enjoy using. 6. Reference Practice: for this exercised, I grabbed four different references of varying difficulty. I'd love for you to try your hand at the whole squint technique. You can either do all of them or pause on the one you want to try your hand at. Just keep it Very simple. Sketches squint to get the basic shapes. Basic colors. We just want a very rough study. This is like a practice study of an actual piece. I can't wait to see what you work done and what you made. I hope you have fun with this. 7. Work flow: So as you can see here, I used graphite pencil, the mechanical pencil that I showed in the supplies to sketch out the lines. The great thing about wash is it doesn't smear because it's opaque. Even if it did smear the graph it you can't see it because it's so pick. I'm going to see how many times I can say opaque in this video. Someone gonna keep track anyway. Distractions. So yes, pencil sketch is great. Personally, I know some people will cover the whole canvas with the color. I personally don't like doing that. You can see I'm kind of chiseling out the the silhouette. Um, I find if I had just covered one blink solid color than it's no point to sketch in with watercolor. It could make sense because it's translucent and you can you can see your sketches underneath same sometimes with the base layers of acrylic. But even with acrylic, I find I don't do solid washes unless I want it to be totally covered. You can see the characters, uh, in here. I'm keeping them clean and white so that I can keep all of my details from my sketch lor very easy to access. Now it could take a little practice, or sometimes certain reference are harder to do than others. Differentiating color layers and shapes, and especially backgrounds to simplify them can be a bit difficult. Something that I have found most helpful in this is Besides, practice obviously, is squinting. Super easy hurt hacks of ash. If you take a photo reference and squint at it, then the colors and shapes will simplify just because you're filtering it by squinting. So that could be really helpful if you struggle simplifying shapes and colors in your paintings. And really, that's what you want to start with. You want to start with the simplest colors and shapes as your background and then build details into it. Okay, let's talk about workflow. There are a few different ways you can go about this again. Everyone has a different workflow. So with time with experimenting, you'll find what works best for you. I personally use a combination of three not complicated at all, I know, but hopefully it'll make sense when I explain it first. That I find most important is working field of view. How what is the first furthest thing away? because we're working with opaque paints we're going to want to build. And what I find most useful is to work furthest to closest, because then you are physically making the closest things to you on top of all the other layers of paint. Hopefully, that makes sense. It helps the illusion of the painting being three D. You aren't You don't have to be careful about, you know, painting are round plants that air close up to you. You don't have to worry about getting a funky little border that you don't want because you've already laid the whole background foundation behind you. So hopefully that makes sense. That is one of my most important work flows. In my opinion, the next one is working darker toe lighter, which I use that and also working mid tones and adding shadows and highlights, which you'll see a little bit later on the Linus. His body, I kind of worked mid tones, added some highlights and shadows, but let's talk about the working darker to lighter. First, let's not get ahead of ourselves. So working Decker to lighter I like for the same reason I like working furthest vantage 0.2 closest because, quite often with a three D object, the darkest parent is gonna be what's furthest away from you. And then the highlight is going to be what's closest to you. So working darker to later again helps perpetuate the three D effect of things or the field of vision. Or helps, of course, helps with the light source establishing the light source. I really enjoy working darker toe lighter, however, Sometimes it's hard to know just how dark you need to go, which is why sometimes I end up working, uh, mid mid tones first and then adding shadows. If that isn't dark enough, I decided, then I go in and at shadow accents and highlights. Of course, highlights for me are always the last thing that I do, because that to me should be closest. That should be the clearest thing and the most punchy and again, usually highlights are the smallest marks on the page, so it's easy just to do that on top, not have to work around. I was struggling with the background a little bit at this point, but I had gotten the basic colors down that I wanted, so I decided to take a break from the background and work on the characters, basically ignoring my own advice of working for this two closest, but it's okay. 8. Water check: If your water looks like this, you change that water. You want it to look like this, which will only last like to paint brushes, dips in. I'm kidding. Okay, well, sort of. 9. Building Character: next up, let's talk about building character. And no, we're not talking about your personality. Who brooms? Okay, we're talking about characters in your painting. One thing to always keep in mind is values. You want to think about how you were background and your subject. If you have a main character in your subject, are going to interact. So do you want them to feel like a part of the landscape in the fact that they almost blend in a bit? Or do you really want there to be large differing values? For instance, with this piece, I had to balance lines blending into their environment but also wanting them to stand out enough. One hack that I have seen many artists use is if you can take a picture of your piece and then change it to black and white. So most phones have that that you can edit it or put a filter on a photo than just change it to black and white, and you can see the values of the peace. Colors can sometimes trick your I, but black and white don't lie. They will show you if the overall values are too similar in a piece, or if that's what you're going for, you can. You can do that. It's fine. It's art. You do what you want, but if you want there to be a stark difference in values than the black and white hack is super helpful. With this piece, I decided I wanted the mail to be a darker, more blue green and the male to be a paler yellow green. These are danda lines. I don't remember if I actually mentioned that. That's kind of a big detail. These air danda lions be there, a pun painting that I'm working on that I'm super excited about. I love puns and designing hybrid creatures. So here you can see I am painting a dandelion leaf tail for this lioness first coat on the dental entail. It was a bit too translucent because I actually added a little bit too much water. So I went over with another coat to kind of solidify it, which worked great here I am going in with some shadows because, as I had talked about before, sometimes your darkest value isn't as dark as you desired. So this is what happened with the Linus. I went dark enough with the male, but not with the female. So I decided to make the first layer of mid tone. And here I am, going in with shadows, kind of, uh, chiseling out her, her shapes and her muscles a bit more trying, adding some some depth here. I had loads of fun with this piece. I struggled a lot, but it was so much fun and very satisfying. Teoh bring them slowly to life. Speaking of adding too much water, it is important to add water. It's kind of a delicate balance with wash. Watercolor does dry quickly, so you do have to keep adding water to it to keep it workable. On your palate, however, it's a delicate balance because if you add too much water than it loses its opacity, so much fun, right by trial and error. That's another reason why it's great to have a piece of scrap paper for swatches. So you contest the opacity really quick before laying down a new color or an old color that you've reactivated to test the opacity, essentially to reactivate a dried blob of wash, I add a drop of water, no exaggeration. Dip my paintbrush in and let a drop. Or maybe if I'm feeling crazy and there's old, big dollop of drag wash two drops, then you let it soak in. Mix it. I mix it with my palette knife personally, mix it and then add a little bit more if you need. But let it soak in. Reactivate the paint like don't go crazy. Don't slap him. Loads of water, which is what I was used to with watercolor. So that was a little bit of a learning curve. But once you get used to it, you're still going to do too much sometimes. But it gets easier. It gets easier. It does, I promise. As you can see, I have now started adding highlights to the lioness for the tail. I actually went out and picked a dandelion leaf because I searched for a little while to try and find the right, uh, pose of what I pictured for this tale. But it was really hard to find exactly what I needed. I can't imagine why, and then I was like Ashley, you have a 1,000,000 dandelions in your yard. You might as well put them to good use. So I took a break, went outside, realized how gorgeous it was, basked in the sun a little bit and picked it kind of line leaf. Which then I posed exactly how I wanted and took a picture. So this painting actually ended up being a mishmash of 1234 different reference shots, Um, kind of kind of one for the background that the Linus was in. But I tweaked a little bit than a different one for the male and another one for the dame. It lightly so I guess, technically three, but then tweaked the background a little bit. So three and imagination look out. Oh, and then at this stage, well, a little bit while ago I started adding the shadows in the leaf tail. And then I realized, you know, the shadows on the lionesses body weren't quite deep enough. So here I am, adding in those those darkest values which really helped the lionesses body come together, I find really tied it together. So as you can see there's no set rule, you can do mid tones, highlight. I did highlights before the shadows actually with her, and added a little bit of shadow of end so there's no rules have done with it. Make mistakes learn and you can get a workflow and then throw it out the window, depending on the painting. So now that I'm pretty much finished with the bodies, I'm gonna be working on the faces. I did the body's first because the faces is really going to be the focal point with this painting. So I really wanted them to pop in them, So excited to share this with you guys. 10. Blending: all right. A common question that I have heard in the gua sh community. Can, we say, is struggling with blending, and this is definitely an interesting and difficult technique to learn with quash. Maybe I shouldn't say difficult. It's different, very different than watercolor. One of the reasons why is, since it's such an opaque layer that you're working with. If you paint something over top with too much water, it is extremely easy to reactivate the bottom layer and then lower the A pass it e and then you start seeing page through, and then you throw away the whole big No, you don't, but it's a struggle. It is definitely a struggle. So here I am going to mention a few tips that I found helpful and also mentioned another type of wash that I have heard I have not personally experimented with. But I've heard makes hombre and blending easier, very interesting. So first off, you must be very light handed with watercolor, for instance. Usually blending involves quite a bit of water or laying down a nice thick layer of water on the paper and then kind of dropping pigments in blending and all round smash it all around. You do not want to do this with wash exact opposite. You need to be very light handed with water washes. And you have to be very deliberate with your strokes. If you it's overworking area, you're gonna lift the previous layer. Uh, or you're gonna end up making it to translucent. There's just so many things that could go wrong, but it is possible it is possible. And with this mail, I actually show ways to use translucent quash. I'll talk about that in a moment. Okay? So blending What I have found is, if you're working on top of a previous layer, you need to either lay down paint and then add a very little bit of clean water around the edges. Or you can lay down a very light layer of clean water and then paint on top of it. But again, the whole emphasis is very light layers, very light touches of water. Okay, so let's talk about when you do want translucence in gua. Sh With this males main, I I wanted to really capture the effect of a dandelion going to seed. So as you can see what I just did was I had a previous layer of brown which kind of signifies the head of of the flower. And then I, um, added quite a bit of water to the gray and just lightly went over the center because the center is where I wanted to have that translucent effect. You concede a bit better now so you can see the brown through the grey, but the gray still gives it that effect of theirs. Fluff. So I was really pleased how this actually how this affected that I wasn't sure how would work. But I believe the best tip I would say with translucent is again It's gonna be kind of repeating myself. Is working dark to light because darks will show up way better behind a translucent layer or something lighter. So it worked perfect with the standard line. But I mean, if you wanna try something else, try it. You'll get different effects, no matter how you decide to do it. So, uh, what I did was I did a translucent layer, and then I went over with more opaque paint to kind of add the texture of the dandelion fluff to kind of denote. Add a little bit of stems and the fluff and yeah, and it worked out really good. I was really pleased out how it turned out again with this head. The his face. It's interesting. I ended up doing mid tones again, so I wasn't quite pleased. How dark? So as you can see here, I went in with more shadows and highlights. So I I added a bit of definition to his face, lips nose around his eyes and then added the lighter highlights that I wanted. And it worked quite nicely, actually. And I find it can be a struggle to get your start with your darkest value that you want. So I have found that working mid tones and and adding shadows and highlights is actually a very effective method as well. And I did go in with some more highlights, and that's the nice thing. With squash, you can just slowly build more and more. Um, I did have a bit more water in these washes, which you can see, um, as it dries. It changes the tone, but I was being very light handed. You can see I'm using a very small brush so that it doesn't have complete control of the wash. And, um, I was being very delicate so as to not reactivate his previous face layer. So I hope these tips were a little bit helpful for you and how to use translucent and blending. 11. Other types of gouache: briefly, I will talk about other types of squash. Mainly, there's just one that I ran at the time in the previous video to dog bed. It is acrylic wash. Now this is very interesting to me. I have not tried it yet, but I am in the process of getting my hands on some, essentially, while it is wet, it acts the exact same as the squash that I have been using. However, once it dries, it is waterproof. It is permanent. You cannot reactivate it, which is super cool, that that has the possibilities of being super helpful. Because if you are very deliberate with the layers you you put down and you are satisfied with them, then there's really no need to lift the previous layers, which would give you way more freedom with the amount of water you use, which would mean you could get much smoother ingredients and blends. And yeah, it sounds like a pretty cool type of wash that I, uh, will perhaps do a future tutorial on depending on if I love it or hate it. No, I will probably do in either way because it's really fascinating, and it can overcome some of the difficulties of working with this type of squash. Okay, To wrap up this painting, I decided to add more texture to the background foreground and surrounding the danda lines to make it feel like they were a bit more part of the scenery around them. The difference in detail between the the characters and the background was bothering me a bit, and I'm really glad that I did in fact go in and adds more grasses, little tiny plants around them. It actually worked quite well for me to do this afterwards because some of the plants were over top of them and it felt very organic. It felt very good the way it layered on top. So, yes, I hope you guys enjoyed watching me paint thes dandelions, and I hope that you have a blast creating your own masterpiece. I cannot wait to see it 12. Tape peel : 13. Conclusion: congratulations. You made it to the end. I hope that this tutorial was helpful for you and that you enjoyed yourself. And I hope you have so much fun with wash. I feel like it is an underappreciated medium. Because I have talked to a number of people that go, Yeah, Wash. And I'm like, you gotta try it. So I hope if you do do something based off my, um my tutorial that you share it with me and tag me either here, in skill share, that would be amazing. Or also, if you're on instagram, my tag is at Ash M Hills. And I would love it if you tag me. If you did a project or a full blown painting based off editorial, I want to see it. Please tell me so I guess that's it for now. Thank you so much again for supporting this adventure of mine on skill shirt. I'm loving it. So far. Let's go share. It looks after a cell like teachers and students alike. I'm very impressed with them. Yeah, so we'll see you next time. Bye. Happy urging