Wildflower Wonderland: A Gouache Painting Adventure

1. Introduction: Picture yourself painting with ease as you infuse mood and vibe through color as the world around you fades away and you immerse yourself in this magic of creating. Inside this class, I will teach you how to paint a stunning meadow with scene gouache, a very versatile and vibrant medium. If you're new to painting, you will learn how to mix colors with ease and use brushwork to bring your piece to life. If you're an experienced painter, you'll have the opportunity to explore and refine your skills. I will guide you through the process of layering your painting with those mountains in the distance and the field of wild flowers, dancing under a magical pink sky. By the end of the class, you'll have created a beautiful piece of art. Join me for a mesmerizing painting adventure as we dive into the fun, playful nature of painting nature, and the magic of gouache. I'll see you inside. 2. Class Materials: The supplies that you'll need for this class, are gouache, paper, paintbrush and a pallet and some water. I'll do a quick overview on what I'm using so you know and the reasons why. As it turns out, I don't have a light pink gouache, and I want to use mostly light pink. I have discovered some colors that I think will pair well together as they mix. I grabbed my primary magenta, which is like a fuchsia color, and then my pale peach, I could use white, but I think that I want to use this pale peach on its own also. I grabbed these two and I figured less is more. If I want this color, that's going to be great, straight out of the tube. If I want to lighten this quite a bit, I know I can use this. That's how I decided that, it doesn't have to be this color. Then I have ash rose, which is a really pretty taupey color, and then I have light bright red. That is so that I can add a little bit of edginess to this softer palette. Now, this is my primary palette and I know that I'm going to want some accent colors to go along with it so I'm pulling in this luminous opera. You'll notice that this says acrylic, it is not gouache. That is because this is what I have and I know that they do have neon gouaches, it's going to work similarly, I'm not using this for anything but tiny details. Also, you don't need to use a neon, it's just a little pop of color that I'll share how I use that when we get to that point. I also have a white and this is also an acrylic and it's just because I ran out of my white gouache. There's no other reason why I'm grabbing this one. I just happen to mix a lot of white with a lot of, as you can see, this one's pretty empty. We're using Holbein, at least I'm using Holbein gouache. The difference between this and other gouaches, this is acrylic based gouache and most gouaches are water-based, meaning if I was to put this down on a paint palette and then let it dry and then take water to it again, it will not reactivate. Other water-based gouaches will. It doesn't matter if this is water-based or not when I'm using the white to mix it. It's just an FYI that these are also acrylic based. Then I also want to, just for the sky, pull in a little different hue. I'm pulling in pale lavender. I'm going to show you what this final project looks like and how all of these colors are integrated into it in just a moment, but for now, I'm also going to talk about the brushes that I'll be using. The main brush that I want to use, actually, these are all going to play together pretty well. I'm using three brushes. I want you to use what you have, but if you happen to have a small-ish round brush, it can be a size 4, 6, 8. I'm going to be using a six. If you have a liner brush, that's a really fine tip. It is concentrated the same width throughout so it's not going to get pointy at the tip like a round brush wood. I'm using a 20/0. You could get away with a zero even, it's just that nice thin line. Then I'm using a wash brush, a one-inch wash brush. You could use half an inch. We're just going to be working quickly. We're going to be working with mark making. These sizes are not necessary, but that is what I am using if you'd like to follow along and you have those sizes on hand. I will also mention paper. If you want to create a final piece, I would recommend using watercolor paper, 300 GSM or 140 pound paper. Cold press means that there's a texture to the paper. I just like the way that it looks more, especially with wet media. Gouache is a little more forgiving than watercolor and it won't get so muddy or grayish with hot press, if you do have hot press, but I liked that textured finish. This one, I think, you can see the texture here. Some papers are very textured. This one's just like a medium version of that. You'll need a jar of water and then you'll also need a pallet to work on. You can use anything that is non-porous, so you could even use the back of a Tupperware. I just want to introduce this to you because it's my favorite thing. If you know you're going to be working on a project for longer than an hour, let's say you want to come back to it the next day and you don't want to waste a bunch of paint. The way that this works is it's an airtight container. You get this wet and it expands to the whole thing. Then they have this pallet paper, these are wrinkled because they've been in my storage, they're just a thicker paper and it lays on top of it. The moisture, it won't ruin the paper because it's meant for it, but the moisture from this, you put your paint on here, and it keeps your paint moist for weeks. I'm not even kidding you. It's the best investment if you work with acrylic or gouache because your paint's not going to dry and you can keep using it. I'll show you what that looks like as we get to working, but this won't stay up like this, it's just dry right now. I'm going to give you a quick overview of how these colors were applied so you now and have a visual before we go in so you know how to plan your colors. I mixed a light pink here and then I brought in this pale lavender color just underneath like this, I would call it a pink cloud covering. That was the only place that I used that and don't worry, we'll walk through all of these steps, but I just want you to see it at a bird's eye view of how these colors came into play. My red is background, so behind all this, it just creates that buildup, and also on my horizon. I have this pale peach working throughout with the white. Then, I already talked about that, I've got my taupe color also mixed throughout. A lot of grasses and some depth here. Then my pop of neon, and you'll see that just sprinkling throughout. Think about your colors in that way. I would try to stick to a pretty limited color palette, it just, I think, creates a lot more interest and I usually find that I like doing that in an analogous color palette. Basically, you pick a color on the color wheel and then you pick colors that are close to it. If I picked pink, I could look at violets, reds, things like that in that family, and that's what I've done here. Let's get started. 3. Set Up Your Workspace: The first thing that I want to do is create a border around my page. This is going to make it so that I have a nice crisp line, almost like a matted frame look on my piece. To do that, I use washi tape. It's not as sticky as painters tape or masking tape and I just make sure that it's straight. If you want to use a ruler, you totally can. I just measure along the edge here. If it looks straight to my eyeball, then I feel [LAUGHTER] like that's good enough. Especially in my sketchbook, which I didn't mention, but it is a Strathmore watercolor sketchbook and I have linked to that for you as well in your resources in case you want to know, it's my favorite favorite sketchbook ever. Once I have that taped off, I just make sure and go along the edges and press gently along the inside. The outside I don't care that much about, it's just the inside that I really care about because if paints slips up underneath there, it's not going to have that nice, fine edge. I'm not going to paint over it, I'm just going to paint inside of these restrictions, these borders. That's all I'm going to focus on. I would normally get a jar for water, that for cool colors and for warm colors. I'm basically using the same family of colors for the entire thing. I'm only going to use one jar of water, but I am going to show you how much I wet this before I put it in here. I'm just going to get this wet real quick. I would say that I ran this underwater for about 15 seconds to where there was no area that was still hard. Everything is now very flexible and you can see it's not dripping with water. I didn't squeeze it to too much. I squeezed it just enough and then didn't wring it the full way out because I do want some of that moisture to be left in here. Then I just lay it down and you can see now it lays flat. Then I will put one of my pieces, a pallet paper here and start using it. Then once I have that paint down, I can easily, when I'm done using it. Place this and then it'll be good to go [LAUGHTER] in three days if I don't get to it by then, so it's fantastic. It's an easy setup. If you don't have one of these, you don't need one, just get something that's like a non porous surface, I've actually used this plastic bag that these papers go into. Once you have your border up, we can get to starting to paint the sky. 4. Class Meadow 3 Sky: We are going to begin by starting our background. I'm going to just put down basically little dots of gouache and I'll be adding to them but I start this way because I don't want to waste any paint. Oftentimes I find that as I dive in, I end up changing my mind a lot. This helps me to preserve as much as I can. You know I wouldn't normally put them this close together, but I guess I'm feeling wild today. [LAUGHTER] But let's jump in and start this. I want this to be pretty light. I'm going to use a wash brush. I am getting it nice and wet, dragging the excess off the sides of my brush. Then I'm going to pull some of this lighter color out and I'm going to grab the corner of this pink color and just mix it in. But I want barely any of that one because I just want this to be nice and light. I'm going to test this first. I can see the color I'm making, but I just want to see how this lays down. Make sure that my brush is wet enough. I like this. This is pretty. I might want to add a little more water just for the spread. You'll notice that too with gouache, you can make it work similarly to watercolor, but overall, it's best to have a nice amount ratio paint to water and gouache will always come across a little more opaque. I'm going to add some white. I just want to lighten this up a little more. I just want it to be even lighter. I'm also going to have a little bit of a transition. The color of the sky here it will be more concentrated color into light, but I'm also going to change the hue here in a minute. I just did a quick wash of that white and now I'm going to add a little bit of this periwinkle color. It's called pale lavender and it's just so pretty just directly out of the tube. I love it. I don't often mix it with anything. I just use it as is because it's so pretty. I'm just going to pull some of that. I'm not even rinsing my brush. I might come over here and grab some of that underlying color I already had and just paint that in. Then I can go over that again just to soften it and bring it up into the other parts of the sky. Then I'm going to rinse my brush really well and drag it off the side, maybe rinse that even more. That's about what I want to do for the sky and we can move into creating the horizon in the next video. 5. Foundation: Mountain Horizon: Welcome back. We're going to start this part and I want to say, don't overthink this. To add the horizon line, I'm just going to get a neutral color. You can choose whatever you want. We're going to paint just some mountain silhouettes and this part can be a little bit easy to overthink and I don't want you to. The idea is to create a soft, muted tone in the background and I'm going to do just a slight, almost like a triangle V. I'll do another one just next to that. You can see that they are pretty light. I'll add some details in these with a little bit of a darker tone and if I'm being honest, I'm not going to worry too much about the placement so long as it is not fully blended. I've got my shape secured, it is in place. Now I will grab a little bit of a different tone, same colors so I grabbed some of that blue just to reflect the sky and then I'll grab some darker colors here and just paint this in underneath. I don't want it to be perfectly mirroring it, so I'm just going to push it around, but I think I actually covered this a little too much so let's see. When I wet it, it just made it a little lighter and that worked out great. Now I'm pulling some of this pink tone in and I'm mixing it with this brownish color and I can add that tone as well. Notice I'm not creating too much of that outline. I'm just creating a few strokes. It's not going to look right to you, I'll tell you that. Every time that I do this, it doesn't look quite right, but it's supposed to be in the background, so you don't need to worry about details, you don't need to worry about it being accurate to being a mountain. Just make sure that you are creating some depth with different paint strokes. It's like an abstract way of thinking about it. You can see I've got those different varieties in. Get some more this red down. This part is where we can add trees or the thought of trees. They're are going to look like little blobs. I'm using my round brush and I'm using just the tip and I'm just going to drag little lines down off of one main line. I'm actually going to switch this up a little bit after this part and bring some dots, little mark making to the top of these trees just to vary the style. You can see it's truly just pushing these trees in place and creating almost a grounding area for where this horizon line will be. These are just little marks. I'll have some that are a little bit higher than others, I don't want to do too much of a cluster throughout the whole thing. I want to create some areas that are more condensed and then spread out. This area, I'm not going to bring those high trees and then to the left, I can create that concentration just at the horizon. Don't worry if this isn't straight because we're going to end up going over it again. You can see that it's just noise, it's just the assumption that there is this horizon, this lush area further in the distance. I'll rinse my brush really well and now we are going to move into creating some foreground, just starting a base. I'm going to grab my wash brush and I'm just going to get the tip of it lighter and smooth it out a little bit where I just put the horizon. If it's still wet, you're going to get paint on your brush and that's totally okay because you'll see very shortly that this whole entire area will be transformed into all of the colors working together. That's okay if it does run into it. In fact, when I do this with watercolor, I actually prefer that because the bleed is so pretty. You can have that effect with gouache, but I'm not really going for that at this moment, but you can definitely experiment with it. It's very fun. I'm grabbing a little bit of this taupe color. This is where it's easy to overthink and I don't want that to happen. I just place very thin lines, if I think about it like that, thin lines that are close to the horizon and then also a few places down the page. They're just very thin, they're not perfect lines, they have a little bit of movement and that just leads my eye and sets me up for what we are about to go over in our next video. Don't overthink it and keep it simple. 6. Get Dirty in the Ugly Stage: In this very short lesson, we're going to go through what I call the ugly stage, which is also one of my favorites. I'm going to grab all the colors that I am going to want in this composition, but I'm going to start with the boldest, which is this red color. I'm using my wash brush, setting it flat and pulling toward me just little strokes pulling toward me. This is creating a background noise essentially that I will layer on top of but instead of painting flowers and grasses right away against paper, this is going to allow more of a depth effect. It's going to look like it's a lot more layered with very little effort. You can see I have grabbed some lighter tones I'm now pulling that mob color at the top or top mob [LAUGHTER] in here as well. I'm not blending things together, I'm just letting them start to stack. Now I want to grab some lighter colors. I'm mixing some of the white in and I'm still doing the same thing while keeping those spaces, those thin lines that I created in the last video. I am keeping those just so I can use them as reference for breaks in the landscape. That's going to serve as though everything I just painted all this red, ugly stage that's closest to me is my fill of wild flowers. Then the depth begins to get lighter as it gets further in the distance. Essentially, that's what we're looking at. I'm going to add a little more white. Then I can see those areas they don't come across the way you would think yet, but we're not done building. This is where we are just setting that background in. Now, I don't have to use this many colors and neither do you, you can use one flat color and then just create some areas that have a little bit of darker and a little lighter, but I recommend just keeping these very horizontal and thin. When you pull these strokes toward yourself, just keep them short, and then you're done and we can start putting in our flowers. 7. Enhance With Wildflowers: Welcome back. We're just going to jump right in. I am mixing a very light color because I want it to stand out, but I think I do want it to be pretty bright too. It's my pop of color, but for starting, I'm going to keep it pretty light so all of the areas that I created white at first. I am bringing this light pink in and that is just creating some texture and the texture, when I add even more of these flowers is going to make it also look further layer. You can see it's taking very little effort to push these into those white areas. That's one of the reasons I like to have the lighter parts come in. Now I'm going to grab the darker color and use even a lighter pressure and just the tip of my brush. This is setting your scene so that it looks like you have a field of wild flowers and this is before we define it. As it gets further in the distance, your flowers will get smaller, they'll be less spread out and then as it gets closer to you, they're going to be larger. When I get darker like this, the color is more saturated, it's more vibrant. I want them to be basically, they're in clusters, but they're not too perfectly spread out. Just using again the tip of my brush lightly toward the background, which is also up the page. [LAUGHTER] Then more saturated and a little bit thicker toward the bottom of the page, which is essentially closer to you. That could also be more clustered or more, just more of these marks closer to you. But I'm putting them in all the same places. I'm putting them over the white area that I just filled with that light pink and then I can drag it and bring it a few other places, but that's where I'm concentrating this color. I want the details to be the closest to me, so I'm not there yet and I'm going to be when it comes to our next lesson when we actually start to form these flowers. But for now, I just want the assumed texture in there. This is actually a liner brush. It's a 20 over zero, so it's going to get really fine lines if I want, or really fine dots rather that are just the same texture we're talking about. I'm just putting those in the back and then next to those smaller dots that I just made just so nothing is uniform and it looks more natural. Also a very abstract the way to go about creating form, because it's not a actual or we're not painting flowers, we're making marks. But you'll see that as when it's time to put our flowers in, you only need a handful and it just brings the whole scene to life. I would say, it's safe to say that this is part of your ugly stage as well, but it's just starting to create some form. You just start to see, like if you look away and then you look back, you're like, oh, I see what's happening here. Your brain puts it together and then it becomes even more fun. We're just layering and layering. I do wait for it to dry. Gouache is a little more forgiving when it comes to layering on top of it. It's not going to bleed as much unless you have a ton of water that you had sat down. But it won't bleed as much as like watercolor would. But I did wait for this to be pretty much dry before I started putting those in. I grabbed my other brush again, just my smaller round brush and I'm going to do the same thing toward the edges where I just put in the mark-making little dots and they are in little clusters. So I have like 4,5,6, whatever my hand feels like doing just toward the edges. But I don't do too many toward the edges or the bottom because I want to save that for when I start to fill in with grasses, but I'm going to grab a hot pink. This one is just going to be cradled by the darker pink that I just put out. I love a good, unexpected neon. This is actually acrylic paint, so I'm being a little bit rebellious, but they do have neon gouache that will work exactly the same. But I'm essentially just using my liner brush that's real thin at the tip and then I'm just dotting some of this bright pop of a color nearby the other areas that I had already laid down. For me, there's just something that is so fun about an unexpected little pop of color so it's still subtle. I'm adding some of this to the edges and also to a bit of the bottom but I'm keeping the middle bottom like the lower part of the paper that is I'll considered my ugly zone. [LAUGHTER] I'm keeping that pretty open still. I'm going to really play with that area when I enhance grasses and I want to focus on having these mark-making areas that are more clustered for now toward the edges, toward the bottom, but sparser, much sparser as it gets closer to us or further down the page and you see that they are a lot larger. We will bring this to life so again, if you are stuck in that, what is going on here, just trust the process. I have some areas that are going to be lighter, some that are going to be a lot larger and more defined, but just little sprinkles. Think of them as little sprinkles. I like to keep them concentrated, so I do have larger areas that cover a lot more and then I also have some that are just I don't want it to be too uniform. What I'm doing now is I'm taking the additional colors and layering them. If I see one area that's like primarily pretty dark, I'll grab my white, I'll mix it with the other colors I've got, whether that be the mauve or some pink and I'll just start doing some mark-making layering, or I'll set my brush down just next to the other marks. Some layering, some overlap, some next to and that just builds up that texture. I'm not going to have a lot of layering in one spot so you can see my white is just here and there acts like highlights whereas the pink is more overlapping. Now we are ready to bring our grasses in so let's move over and do that part. This part is really fun because you start to see your meadow really come to life. 8. Paint Grasses for Added Detail: Welcome back. In this section, we're going to start to add our grasses and while wildflowers might seem like the most fun part, I actually think that this one is even more fun because this is where the texture comes alive, this is where you just start to see so much movement. To start, I'm taking the tip of my brush. I grabbed the mauve color, it's like a medium tone, and I'm just setting it down and flicking it upward and that's going to create these, there's a base of this shrubby style grass, and then it branches off into these really thin lines toward the top. And then with the very tip of my brush, I'll just create vertical lines. That angle left and right a little bit, but for the most part goes straight up. Now I'm grabbing this deeper color to go over the deeper color right here. I want something that is pretty dark, but still it's not so dark yet, because I'm going to have some layers here. You can see I'm taking the tip of my brush, and I'm just moving it upward, and I'm doing this along the base of where these flowers are and the bottom of the page. That's where I'm starting and then I'm building up. You can see that I'm moving pretty fast. This isn't something I need to do, really intricate lines for. Then some of this, is going to overlap, so if I go to the top of this darker area, I can add some up there. Yours is going to look different than mine because- I'm just going to add some they are not black but dark sepia to darken it. You can add black to dark in your colors also. But your areas on your page might look different because your darker areas came up probably different than mine, and I just use them as guides just to basically have some separation. I'm going to take my liner brush and see how I'm basically holding it horizontally parallel to the paper, I'm using the full brush on its side and I'm just setting it down. Sometimes I'll drag it a little bit, but it's a very thin line. Again, this one is a 20/0, but it just creates these really nice taller grasses or the assumption of grasses, and I alternate between this darker color, and some of those lighter colors, and basically overlapping so that there's that depth, and then I'll add a few more in areas that don't have any yet. And so when I do that, it's showing like this area has a lot of concentration of grasses or this area is a little more sparse. It just makes it so it's not so consistent, which makes it look more lively. Nature is not perfect. Then I'll pull this up further up the page also. We would consider further away from us and are seen, and I'll just create shorter versions of what I just did that surround the assumed wildflowers. So just using the very edge of my brush here, and I can use the tip as well, especially when it gets real small. Then I'm going to switch over to my round brush again, and I'll grab that dark color, and I'm just going to dot or I guess tap as I drag different pressure the horizon line just to deepen what's closest to us, so I might add a little on the trees, but mostly it's just a little bit enough to where it grounds that area more. So the deeper the color, the more that area will feel grounded. That's all we have to do in the grasses area, but you see how much that brought it to life? So finally, we just have to add our staple flowers, which speak for the rest of the flowers. So I can't wait, let's jump into that part. 9. Add Finishing Touches: We're going to create our close-up flowers with a lighter color, at least I am. I'm going to come in with a white and then I'm going to spice it up, I guess, almost white. Then I'll spice it up a bit with a little more color after I lay the foundation. You can see what I'm doing here is just creating four strokes and then a little connector at the bottom. So 1, 2, 3, and then a little connector, maybe three strokes or four strokes. But essentially what this is is like the petals are longer on the outside and then on the top and bottom, they're just a little shorter. These are acting as though the flowers are facing upward, but on their sides we can see the inside, but they're flat toward the sky-ish. They're assumed flowers, basically. Then when you add the centers, just little marks with the tip of your brush, they start to come to life even more. I'm going to add some white, get this a little lighter. I'm just setting it down to define the petals a little more. I'm not going over all the petal, I'm just adding a little bit to the individual ones. I'm not really putting a lot of strategy in my method. I just want to define what can look like highlights, but you can already see these look like flowers and it was with very little effort. Essentially, the petals are just pointing upward. They're shorter on the bottom and then there's a little bit of a center that goes in and that just creates the form. Then I can come in with this neon color, again, make things pop just in the middle, just enough to give us a little bit of excitement. I'm going to just try and add this into the petals and see what happens. I don't think I'm going to like that, but if I layer it back with white, it adds in that depth. Maybe I'll do that with all of them. That might be fun. I made it a little bit muddy. We don't want that. This would have worked fine. I'm going to do this a little bit smaller, further away, and then I'll just sprinkle in a few more of these so that it does look like it's closer in the foreground, and that it is like truly scattered all over. It almost makes it so that suddenly you're standing in the field of wild flowers rather than looking out at one when they have these bold flowers that are just like here I am. Just concentrate the larger shapes toward the bottom, aka closest to you, flat quick strokes. You could even just put a blob down and then put little tiny mark-making dots with a darker color toward the very center and call it a flower. It works. See what I mean? Just add little dots. Then we can be really careful and take this washy off, and when you do it, you want to make sure that you peel as flat as possible and slow. Then look at this beautiful finish. It is so pretty. I'm so excited. This is my favorite part. Look at these details. They're just so simple and that's it. We're going to go over your next steps, which includes your class project. See you in a sec. 10. Next Steps: Throughout this short time together, you have learned the basics of painting with gouache and how to create this stunning meadow scene with distant mountains and your field of dancing wildflowers. You have brought your painting to life with color blending and composition and brushwork. So congratulations on completing this magical class. It has been such a pleasure to guide you through the process and I want to encourage you to share your masterpiece. Let others see the beauty that you've brought to life. I know that I really want to see it. It's basically the reason I show up. [LAUGHTER] So I would love it if you shared and I'd also love to hear your feedback on this class. Your thoughts and opinions helped me to continuously improve by providing you with the best possible learning experience. Take a moment, leave a review, let others know about your experience, and lastly, be sure to grab your guide on all of my favorite supplies because it is a good one. I will see you super soon.