Something You Should Know Before Gouache Painting

What is Gouache ?

Gouache is a painting which is drawn with water-blended silty pigment. Its performance is characterized between opaque and translucent, and gouache color can produce gorgeous, soft, bright, and deep artistic effects on the canvas. The gouache powder contains a certain limit on the smoothness of the water color. When the gouache is wet, the color saturation is very high. After drying, the color is tarnished due to the effect of the powder, with the saturation is greatly reduced. This is the limitation of its color purity. Learning gouache can be a good understanding way about color and transparency of color. You can learn how to mix color when you are learning gouache.

Learn some Gouache’s Characteristic

The nature and drawing techniques of gouache are closely related to oil painting and watercolor. It is a special painting between oil painting and watercolor. It is similar as the watercolor painting that they both use water soluble pigment and their pigment composition is the same as transparent watercolor paint. But in terms of water color fluidity and transparency, it cannot be compared with watercolor. 

Generally, the reflective effect exhibited by the gouache is quite different from the bright effect of the transparent watercolor. Therefore, the gouache in general does not use the method of mixing colors with lots of water, it uses white color to adjust the brightness of the color by impasting showing its unique color effect. This is somehow more like oil painting. 

Due to the opaque gouache pigments and oil paints are all has occlusion effect, gouache painting is a kind of painting which between watercolor painting and oil painting. It develops its own techniques by absorbing some methods and techniques from watercolor painting and oil painting. Its own most important feature is the powdery nature and opacity of the pigment. Moreover, the color of the gouache is very strong after it has dried out, and the surface has a dull velvety special beauty.

What kind of  art tools do we need?

Gouache ‘s art tools and art materials are relatively simple. The drawing tools include brushes, gouache color , gouche paper and palette.

Gouaches usually use special gouache brushes, watercolor brushes and various brushes. There are two types of gouache brushes : the wolf pen and the sheep . Wolf pen has a certain flexibility, which is suitable for drawing bright parts; sheep pen is characterized by good water absorption and soft hair, which is suitable for drawing wet and soft effects.

The package of gouache paint is such like powder bagged, bottled and tubed package. It is prepared by mixing pigment powder or white powder with binder in a certain ratio, then it could become a water-soluble pigment. There are many different types of gouache colors when painting, but some of the following colors are necessary: white, lemon yellow, medium yellow, raw oyster, earth red, vermilion, raw brown, lake blue, etc. In addition,  when you are sketching don’t forget maintain the humidity of the gouache color. You could put a wet sponge in palette or could use a watering can to keep the paint’s own moisture. 

After preparing all art tools , let’s start to learn gouache painting!