 Hello and welcome to my online art studio which you might notice is a little bit rearranged. I get tired of people telling me my microphone needed to be dusted because when you look at it from that side you see all the dirt. Well now it's moved off camera so you don't have to look at it and I don't have to clean it. I call that a win-win. If you're new here I want to introduce myself. My name is Sandy Allnok. I love to teach art. I work in a lot of different mediums and recently I've been working in watercolor quite a bit. There's a few examples of some of my recent videos and I will link those down below or you can just scroll through my channel and find what you'd like to watch. Today I'm going to be talking about gouache. I've been working with gouache for eight, nine months or so. When I started I wasn't intending to get lost in gouache. Frankly I was having too much fun with watercolor but I'm a Daniel Smith ambassador which is not a paid position just so you know they do occasionally send me some product and they did send gouache to me. I'm not afraid of trying something new so I dove in and tried it and even though I made a lot of mistakes I found it was really fun and it was something that I enjoyed. I am not saying you need to try it. I just want to answer your questions and I hope the further discussion in this video is going to answer some of those questions or concerns that you might have. In this video I'm going to be covering four different areas. First what is gouache and why should you care and how does it differ from watercolor and acrylics? Secondly what supplies do you need and are they going to be expensive? Is this going to break the bank? Third I'm going to give you seven painting tips that changed everything for me with gouache and fourth I'm going to give you some resources that are going to deep dive into some of the areas that I'm going to touch on lightly in this video. All right let's get started with gouache. Let's begin. What is gouache and why should you care? gouache is opaque watercolor. It's more than just watercolor with an opaque rating on the side of the tube. gouache stays brighter and richer in color than watercolor does. It's creamy, it's thick. That means if you're painting something and you want to add a lighter element on top you can do that with gouache. You may already know that you can paint gouache on top of watercolor too but the character of the thick gouache can be a real mismatch with the edges that a watercolor painting can get and the gouache can look a bit like a sticker both in the style of painting as well as the look of the paint itself because gouache has a matte finish that's very different from watercolor. For those who struggle with the out of control nature of watercolor where it bleeds all over the place on you you might find gouache easier. It dries significantly faster so when used in a even a washy fashion it doesn't do all that bursting into blossoms very much. Gouache can be made to look washy though since you can thin it down so folks like me who love some splashiness can get that look as well as controlled areas in a painting. gouache is a little like acrylic since it's thick except that acrylic dries hard and shiny and it won't move once it's dry but gouache dries matte and you can continually rewet it until you fix it in place. That means that a palette full of gouache is still paint that you can rewet and use again whereas leftover acrylic is pretty much wasted and needs to be just scraped into the trash. However with acrylic you can paint another layer right on top without moving anything underneath which is pretty nifty. gouache can be overpainted if you use it super creamy thick after the underpainting is dry. So gouache has different options than acrylic or watercolor and in some ways it combines certain elements out of both of them and adds some others in so that you have a bigger array of choices in techniques for painting with it. There are many styles you can paint with in gouache. The two main ones are the poster or posterized style where everything is simplified into graphic shapes. That's what you'll find the most of on the internet nowadays if you do a google search for beginner's gouache. Posterized art takes advantage of the bright colors that are available in gouache as well and it can be an easier style for those who want to finish a painting but not have to develop realistic drawing skills. The other style that I tend more toward is illustrative it's more realistic. Painting more like an oil painter I'd say letting the brush strokes show getting expressive and even messy. You can splatter you can smoosh create textures. There's a lot of fun to be had if you just loosen up with it. I'll have to say whether you need gouache in your life is a decision you'll need to make. Stick with me through the rest of this a lot of your questions and concerns might be answered and if not then leave comments because I'd love to be able to have a discussion about things that you want to know about gouache and if I need to I'll do a follow-up video and answer those as well. So let's get busy talking about the supplies that you'll need. First you need paint you don't need all the colors please don't buy them all. I have just put together this palette that has what I would recommend as a basic set and I have two brands in here Daniel Smith and Windsor Newton. The colors are mostly comparable between them warm and cool primaries plus a green a yellow ochre and black and white. The Windsor and Newton set was the inspiration to even think about this because it comes in a box all together and Daniel Smith the tubes have to be bought separately which makes them more expensive but honestly the Daniel Smith paints are better. The Windsor and Newton dries out a little faster but you can reconstitute it pretty easily by putting a couple drops of water in and mixing it with a toothpick. You can only do that too at so many times before it no longer paints well but the Windsor and Newton set is much more affordable so I've included it as a recommendation especially if you're just starting out. It's a good one has all you need to mix and I've done some wonderful paintings with it. Buying paints is actually the downside of gouache because you're going to go through paint faster than you do normally with watercolor especially tubes of white since you're using gouache thicker. Good paints aren't cheap and cheap paints aren't good. I've tried some of those really cheap ones that you can get on Amazon and some of them are like painting with pudding. Getting not good gouache is not going to help you learn how to work with decent gouache when you get to that point but since I'm a person who does not want to waste paint hang on because I have some tips that are going to help you get mileage out of the paint that you do buy and fortunately the paint is the only pricey thing about gouache. So you're going to need brushes to go with your gouache the cheaper the better. Cheap brushes don't hold much water because they're synthetic and that's perfect for gouache because not adding excess water when you don't intend to is important. I did buy myself a set of Jack Richardson brushes. They're short handle brushes and they have flat surrounds and they come in a case and that just works for me both in the studio and out sketching. Go with whatever you've got for brushes. You don't have to buy anything fancy for gouache and P.S. gouache does not ruin your brushes the way acrylic would. You treat the brushes the same way you would with watercolor. You care for them by rinsing them really well in water drying them flat and then putting them in a cup or a brush roll to store them once they're completely dry. Paper and surfaces are another thing that makes gouache more affordable. You just want a paper that can handle water media without getting all curled. 140 pounds or higher is preferable but you know it works really great. Canson XL watercolor paper. It's dirt cheap and it works wonderfully. I use sketchbooks watercolor postcards or regular watercolor paper. You can paint on canvases. You can paint on those free paint chips that you can get from your local hardware store. Don't tell them I sent you. Lots of surfaces can accept gouache. Then there's the decision about a palette or no palette. That's an individual choice. I put mine in a palette which works for me and the pallets only $10 anyway so it's on the inexpensive list but you can also just squeeze paint on to whatever you mix on and I mix on ceramic tiles that I got at the hardware store for 89 cents. I even keep a bunch of these on hand so I can save them to rewet to use for background washes in future paintings. So that's about it. All you need for gouache is paint, brushes, something to paint on and something to mix on and that's really it unless you get into fancy techniques that need things like saran wrap or sponges. Cheap things. And now let's get going with my seven tips. I'm very excited to share these with you. The first one is start small. Seriously, I started by trying to paint an 8x10 like I saw people doing on YouTube and oh man was that a terrible thing to do when I was clueless about what I was doing. I can now branch out to a bigger size but I was not ready for that when I first started. A sketchbook this size is just fine. You can practice all the things, all the techniques without using up all your paint while you experiment. Number two, learn how to mix various consistencies of gouache. I came from a watercolor background and I couldn't tell whether my gouache mix was thick enough to cover over another color and if it's not thick enough it's going to lift color from underneath if it's too wet or it can re-wet and muddy everything that's down below it or if it's too thick and chunky it'll crack when it's dry. Learning to mix tea milk cream and double cream is vital to getting gouache under control and here paint with slow strokes in order to get good coverage because these cheap brushes don't expel paint the way some other brushes do that you might be used to. Number three, make a plan for your painting because values matter and order matters but there's no rule like some people would say it's not always dark to light or light to dark. It matters what you're painting. The only way to figure that out is to paint like 50 paintings that's why I say paint tiny ones to get a better sense for how much you can or want to paint on top of another layer. If you want to then pop over to Art Venture which is my community on Mighty Networks there's a link in the doobly-doo post your photo reference and I'll see if I can help you to develop a plan. I'm finding that a washi layer as my first one helps to establish some elements and I build from there sometimes with darks first but sometimes with lights. Number four, when it comes to painting large areas of light colors or white don't paint underneath of them. It's super hard to paint a lot of white or yellow on top of a really rich color underneath so don't just paint the whole background red thinking you can just add the polar bear on top because you're going to fight it every step of the way and your white is just going to be pink because all that color is going to come through. Small bits of white are much easier to leave to add at the end of a painting as the final touch but leave those big white areas open. Number five, do not I repeat do not do all of the swatching charts the way that we do in watercolor because you're going to use up all of your paint just doing swatches. I recommend that your main swatches be tint and shade charts where half of it is blended into white and half blended into black that way you get the main color plus you get to see what that tint to shade spectrum is like. You can also do it more simply with just five variations and then for color mixing charts just do one 50 50 mix or two if you really must not six or ten like we sometimes do in watercolor practice by making a painting using the color mix in your small sketchbook first and always write down what colors you've used. Number six, develop some strategies to keep from adding too much water into your paint for instance when bringing your recently dipped brush to your palette start the water away from the pigment that way if you accidentally picked up too much water you won't over wet the blob of paint and make it so that now it's not going to be usable as thicker paint related to that to keep from constantly rinsing your brush in between picking up palette colors keep some cheap palette knives on hand you can scoop out some paint to mix with and then if you have a large unmixed blob that you haven't touched to water or another color you can scrape that back up and put it into the palette again at the end of your painting session last but not least tip number seven you can preserve a gouache painting and make it waterproof I didn't know this for some time and I really wish I had I've sent out art to folks and I didn't realize there's an art wax that will save your bacon and make your painting waterproof hello gouache cards and postcards at the beginning of this video I promised you lots of resources and I got you covered I just launched a new gouache jumpstart class and before you say oh no she promised free resources and now she's going to make us pay for them hold on just one second have a seat the free pre-class lesson is what I'm talking about in that lesson which normally my pre-class lesson is just about the supplies themselves and a shopping list so that you can get what you need for the class this one includes five videos five count them all for free you don't have to sign up for the class to watch them the topics of these five videos are the supplies including the paint colors that I picked out for a good beginner set tips on how to set up a palette a detailed video on the tea milk cream and double cream mixes my recommendations for tint and shade swatches and how to do those and last but not least how to protect a gouache painting and make it waterproof that is five videos you get to go watch for free inside that pre-class lesson there's a link in the doobly-doo if you decide after watching those that you enjoyed them and you want to explore some techniques with me then you can sign up for the class and in that class we're going to create a sketchbook and in that sketchbook we're going to go through all of the color theory and technique ideas that I have for you we're going to practice a lot of that in small paintings remember I said small paintings and I literally made this class that would teach all the stuff I wish I knew before starting on this gouache journey myself I'm going to show you how to do both the posterized and the illustrative styles for each of the photographs that we're going to be painting from so you can make some decisions about what style you want to pursue in further study in your art and for those who like to make your own Christmas cards I'm going to be working on a gouache Christmas card class this fall so you might want to take the gouache jumpstart class so you're ready when it comes time to take the Christmas one just going to give you that little heads up so you have all your supplies and everything ready when Christmas season comes this Friday I'll be bringing you another gouache video but this time with stamping included so if you want to see that make sure you're subscribed and click that little bell so that youtube knows you want to be notified of all of my videos that come up so you don't miss a darn thing thank you so much for clicking the like button it means a lot to tell youtube that this was a worthwhile video and tell your friends as well if you know anybody who's been wanting to get into gouache lots of great information here I will see you again on Friday bye bye now