Gouache...sort of

The Sktchy challenge this year is half and half, watercolor and gouache. So far I have only done watercolor because, although I bought some tubes of gouache, that was about a year ago, and since I don't use it much, I put it away "somewhere safe" and haven't been able to find it. Well, today I found three tubes of it. Don't ask me why some of it would be in one location but not the rest. I found ultramarine, primary yellow, and burnt sienna, but for the portrait I was going to paint, I also needed black, white, and red. So I used gesso for my white, and substituted watercolor in Payne's Gray and Quin Red, mixing it and using it thickly like gouache, for the others.

The problem with gouache portraits is, you can go on forever. Watercolor is an unforgiving medium, in the sense that once it soaks into the paper, it's there, and mostly immovable, especially if it's a staining color. Also, even though watercolor paper is forgiving to a point, more than three or four or six glazes, particularly if you are a "scrubby" painter, is pretty much all it will tolerate before it starts coming apart.

With gouache, however, you can just keep painting over the top. And since you can mix it to be translucent, you can also glaze and get some effects from the paint underneath. But you can't make the mistake of trying to treat it just like watercolor, because it dries more quickly and has a much flatter appearance.

Previous to this, I have been wildly unhappy with any effort I made in gouache, because of that flatness. But today I had a little revelation, because the teacher was an expressionist painter and the portrait wasn't so much about the model but more about the colors and effects he liked that conveyed a feeling. Once I followed his lead and started painting like that, my painting quit looking as literal as a coloring book and took on a little glamour.

I certainly couldn't deliver the kind of thing on first try that Nicolai Gánichev, St. Petersburg painter, achieved...(also, her nose is too long) but letting him direct me in a more impressionist (?) direction certainly helped the quality of my gouache painting. Maybe I will learn to like it after all.

"Abstract Girl"—pencil, gouache, gesso, watercolor, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.