A new medium

For a while now, I have wanted to try out painting with gouache. I started painting 20-some years ago in acrylic and stuck to it for a while, but I didn't like the shiny, plastic quality it had when it dried. Then I switched over to watercolor, and loved the transparency, the layering, the nuance, the bloom, so much that I never used anything else from then on. But I belong to an urban sketching group on Facebook called "Weekend Warriors," and they all paint almost exclusively with gouache.

It's a flat medium, primarily used by illustrators but increasingly also by landscape painters. It has the advantage of being a water medium, like watercolor, so you can at least partially reactivate it, unlike acrylic or oils. You can limitedly paint over the top of it, but it becomes mud if you try too much of that. It is in some ways a much more primitive medium than any I have worked with, calling for blocks of color, unsubtle shapes, and a fair amount of planning ahead—not many happy accidents, unlike with watercolor.

My plan was just to buy some and try it out on landscapes and urban scenes, but a class was offered yesterday by Sketchbook Skool on how to paint portraits in gouache, so I decided to take it. By portraits, it didn't mean great big formal things, it was more a case of finding a black-and-white photo of some people in your family (or stranger photos you pick up at garage sales) and making little scenes, using your imagination to color their clothing and fill in their backgrounds as you please. The teacher was Jennifer Orkin Lewis, aka August Wren (website here), and we followed along as she painted, among other subjects, Danny's grandparents. Here is my effort. I was fairly pleased with the figures and completely unimpressed with the generic background I constructed. Some of my classmates' backgrounds were so imaginative!

Today, after breakfast, a social media session, and a dish-doing interval, I decided to try another one. I think I'm probably trying too hard to capture a likeness as I would with watercolor, and not hard enough to use my imagination to make things better. Also, gouache does NOT rework like watercolor does, nor is it forgiving of blending. Anyway, here is one from a photo I had of my mom, back when she was about 40 and was super into her beehive hairdo, holding our family cat, Peep. I used that raspberry color for the background because that was one of her favorites—I vividly recall one outfit, a raspberry suit with a pale pink blouse, pink heels, and a big raspberry straw hat with a dip in the front that held a pale pink rose. Mom was always stylish. I still have the hat.

I'm going to keep exploring this, even though it's a struggle, and try out urban landscapes to see if I do better at those. It kind of seems a shame to work as hard as I have to learn to capture a likeness in watercolor, only to give it up by using a less adaptable medium. I'm so nervous in this new arena that I don't stop and consider things like proportion—I looked back at this a few hours later and realized that her head is about double the size it should be for her body!

I was also inspired (and this is why I may continue with the figures, despite the likeness issue) by the gouache paintings of people and books by Jenny Kroik, a young and gifted artist whose illustrations have graced the cover of The New Yorker magazine multiple times.