art journal
Inspired by some people around neocities, since now I have a proper space for it, I decided to run small art journal where I note various things, thoughts, techniques and links (or maybe this will be good enough for own page I guess?) mainly not to forget it but also to track my progress and explorations.
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20th February 2022
Some notes about working with gouache after a good while of not touching it
I think it was a good while since I used any colored media since currently I'm just a bit more about just inks, working on my line weight and form described only by lines which is a thing worth doing - you improve lot of skills because of it but after a while I wanted to go back to something else.
Gouache is a medium I like but I seemingly can't find a way to use it, since with painting I'm pretty much torn between blending colors nicely or using more graphic, shape driven style. It has advantages for both, like you can mix dried colors really nicely but on the other side it dries pretty quickly. Yesterday I took out only black and white jars I need to finish to play around with grayscale and mixing, I noticed some things I need to remember about and are just fun:
- Synthetic brushes always are better than natural hair, which is just better suited for watercolor. Unless you want to use it transparently, synthetics are better option since they hold paint more nicely since it got more body. Like with oils and bristle brushes, it needs to be pretty hard but still elastic to hold more of it.
- I recommend adding a bit of water to make consistency similar to cream, which seems to be best to lay in huge shapes and it glides nicely.
- Watered down one can create nice blooming effects, more opacity than usual watercolor can give completetly new effects.
- Not really rough, but not really smooth, at least 350gsm paper is the best based on my experience.
- For the end (so far), the most important thing is to get a proper super fine gouache which is key to enjoy the medium. Huge particles of not properly ground pigments make nice, velvety finish worse to achieve and cheap gouache can end being very streaky. Royal Talens got pretty affordable jars of really quality paint. I recommend getting two of each primaries if you can afford it - both a cool and warm yellow, blue and red. Some small earth colors are nice too.