Watercolour, or Gouache?
To gouache, or not to gouache? That is the question.
My personal style is watercolour and I particularly love the juxtaposition of bright luminous colours with deep dark blue hues. However, I often find it difficult to make the watercolour bright enough, or, dark enough for my taste. Usually what I do is add several layers and build the colour up. In the art world that's called glazing, but though I love the delicate transparency of watercolour glazes, sometimes you just want to make a bright splash, and for that, you need gouache!
What is gouache?
Gouache is a paint somewhere between watercolour and acrylic, that feels like painting in watercolour, but it's a thicker paint designed to be opaque with a matte finish, whilst watercolours are designed to be translucent. Wet gouache has the consistency of Vegemite and glides easily onto the page. You can use it wet-on-dry, it works quite well wet-on-wet, and you can add lots of water to your brush and turn it into spatter as well. It’s much easier to get bold bright colours without multiple glazes. Just like watercolour, the paint comes out in liquid form and hardens into a cake that you simply add water to when you’re ready to paint again. And as they are water soluble, cleaning up is easy too.
One advantage gouache seems to have is that not only can you paint dark over light, you can also paint light over dark, which is something you cannot do with watercolour.
Which set should I get?
Using watercolour has become part of my individual style, as unique as a fingerprint, and though I had brought my watercolours with me on holiday, I was on the lookout for something new. So, I was pouring over the shelves in the international art store, with high hopes of finding something unexpected. And what did I find? Gouache!
I had heard of gouache, but had never used it to paint with, so when I found these great sets by Himi, I couldn't resist getting one for myself, as well as one for my artist dad. I was really surprised by how heavy they were and did start to wonder if they might cause a problem when packing for the plane, but the set is beautiful. It is the 24 colour palette set, each well individually sealed, and came with a mixing plate and a choice of exterior colours. I chose pink because, well… why not! Each colour well is 3cm x 3.5cm x 2cm (approx.) and the colours are deliciously bright. I had a sneaky suspicion, proved correct, that the paint was quite liquidy, so I didn’t open them until I arrived back in Perth, just in case they didn’t dry out in time for the flight home. (Jury is out on how colourfast they are).
So it was my dad who was the first to open each capsule of colour and have a play.
“Wow! These are fantastic!” he told me. “They act like watercolours but have the intensity of colour that I like, and I can make them more opaque if I want to”. Now he paints with them all the time. I've turned my dad into a gouache devotee, and I would thoroughly recommend them to anyone starting or expanding their artistic journey.
How do I use them?
To start, I always spray my paints to “wake them up”, then use a wet brush to pick up the colour. I’ve also made myself a colour swatch card on 300gsm paper, because a dry colour block can look very different from the colour they’ll be in your artwork; and, because I wanted to see how gouache would react with salt and splashes of water.
I’ve put together a simple flower painting project video here to show you both my process and the Himi gouache.
If you love bold bright colours like I do, then gouache is definitely something to consider!
Happy joy chasing.
Monique x