 Hello there, my name is Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums and I love to help you grow as well. I hope you'll find something in this video or on my channel that is gonna help you do just that. Please do subscribe if you like what you see here. I am gonna be talking about gouache today. Last year, at the end of the year, I received a packet from Daniel Smith who I'm an ambassador for. They sent me their 22 colors of gouache. I have not worked in opaque mediums since college. That was out of my depth and I had never even invested in gouache because I wasn't really sure I wanted to get into that, go down that rabbit hole. But since the paints were here, I decided to dedicate the month of January to seeing what I could do with the medium. I have not taken any classes. I have just scratched the surface of looking at a few artists who work in gouache professionally. And that's really it. The rest of it, I'm just bringing me to the table to see what I can do with this medium. And I have to say that as hard as I found a lot of the elements of gouache and as much as I struggled, I have not been this happy in so long because I love to learn. And when I'm in that uncomfortable place where I don't know what I'm doing, that's my happy spot. In this video, I'm gonna talk about three different areas, three sections. And in the first one, it's gonna be the supplies themselves. So I'll review that palette that I introduced you to a month ago and tell you if it's still working. Secondly, I'm gonna be reviewing my own paintings from the month of January. And just telling you where I struggled with each one of them. I want you to know that they're beautiful paintings. I think they are beautiful paintings. I am not dissing on myself as an artist, but I'm honestly looking at myself, at the level that I'm at and looking at what I was trying to accomplish. Just because I'm critical of my work doesn't mean I'm being down on myself. And I hope you can do the same thing at your level. Just make sure you're gauging your own work at your own level. I might be in a different place in my journey than you are in yours. So I'm looking for different kinds of things out of my own work. Now the third part of this video is gonna be a demo, a very stripped down kind of quick demo so that I can show you some of the things that I learned from those paintings and how you might avoid some of them in a very simple painting. All right, are you ready to go? Let's do this. So let's take a look at the palette and how it survived. It's an airtight palette that I showed about a month ago and I wanted to let you know how it did. I was very surprised. I was happily surprised, shall I say? I wasn't expecting the paints to stay as wet as they did. They did get a little more like a piece of gum in some cases. Some colors dried out sooner than others but nothing got rock hard in this palette and they're very easy to reconstitute with your brush, just a little water and they will soften pretty easily just like watercolors do. And they didn't in this palette get as hard as watercolors do in a watercolor pan but you do need them to be a little bit moist in order to work with them. You can do that with a brush but here I decided before I proceed with the painting for today, I would just re-wet everything and see what happens. I saw somebody on YouTube use a toothpick and just stir everything up and get them back to decent consistency and that worked really well. I was very delighted to see that that was a thing. Many gouache artists will not even palette their paints. So I'm not gonna tell you right now that palading is a good idea. This is a cheap palette and it works well so if you want to, this is one I can recommend but I don't know that that's best. There are gouache artists who will put their tubes in a jar, an airtight jar so that even their tubes aren't exposed to air because gouache paint is expensive and you have to use a lot of it to paint with. You use more gouache paint than you use watercolor so you want to preserve them as long as possible and you can reconstitute them from the pans. You can also reconstitute on a palette. There are artists who keep their same palette, they just keep reusing it and adding more color to it and they'll use bigger ones that I'm using, I'm just using a little tile so I keep cleaning it. But there's one artist who scrapes all of her leftovers and she makes a big gray like she just always has gray around because she takes all the colors and smooshes them together to make a gray color. So, palette is all refreshed and ready to roll. So I've had a lot of people ask what kind of brushes you use for gouache and I have to say I was using my really good stable brushes for my gouache to start with, not the brightest idea because stable brushes are gonna hold more water, that's why I love them for watercolor. They just hold it and expel it in a way that works with watercolor. They don't work as well with gouache because you want to not have a lot of water in them. The only brush that worked really well was this little guy but I've set him aside and he's back in my watercolor stash because I realized I did have some brushes in my rejected for watercolor stash that I brought into using for gouache. And so I had this little number one which is a Utrecht brush. I have a four and a six-blick and then I bought a set of terrible, terrible brushes just because I needed a flat brush and they were like 24 brushes for $20. It was really, really bad brushes. When you paint with them, you can kind of feel that the end is loose but I need to get a decent flat brush to use but I'm gonna be using these for the time being because I need to use something that doesn't hold a lot of water. So let's look at some of my paintings that I did for the last month and a bunch of them. You can see that I used my little itty bitty zero brush on a lot of this detail. This painting took me five hours. Five hours, that is insane. I don't wanna be spending five hours on a tiny painting. I wanna be able to do a bigger thing and not spend like 20 hours on it. So I set it as a goal to see if I could get myself to the point where I could do a decent little painting like this in an hour by the time the month ended. This one was a lot of fun to do but again, a lot of detail, a lot of little tiny stuff going on. There are brushes that will do this kind of detail for trees. What I did here though was paint the sky first and then I painted the greens for the trees, added the branches and the trunk and then added on top of that more of the greens to break up the browns. Then we have two of my floral gardens and these were fun to work on as well. Lots of flowers in them. This one was in the 30 days to more confident watercolor class. Some of you might recognize that and I painted it in gouache. I found I had more success painting when I had already worked out some of the details in painting a watercolor of something so I may go back through some of the things I've painted in watercolor and do them in gouache. Now one of the things that attracts a lot of people to gouache is thinking you can cover things up. I don't want to tell you times you can cover things up, times you don't want to cover things up and we'll talk about that more in the demo but here I was so proud of myself because I painted this beautiful, very soft background. I found that you can draw on top of gouache. You can see your pencil lines but it was ridiculously hard to get colors to add on and I was trying to add on white took me forever. Again, this was another one of my many, many hour paintings. I'm gonna show you a way to handle that when you're doing your own gouache paintings but here's a case where painting over top of something worked great and I had painted a rabbit in here. This was one of the few paintings that I did that I didn't have a reference for. I was just kind of painting something and I thought oh, let me put a little bunny out here in the grassy field and the rabbit looked like it was from another planet so I painted rocks over top of it. Now, it doesn't make a great feature inside a painting like this to have it just be all about rocks but there you go. At least it's not a weird looking rabbit. This guy, I painted the water on top. Again, a very difficult thing to do. I thought I'm gonna figure out how to do this because that's what gouache is supposed to be able to do is cover things up. I didn't enjoy that process although I did enjoy all my teeny tiny brush work out here in the garden area. It was beautiful. Here's two paintings where I didn't mix up enough of the background color. So here I have a shift from a bluish green to a yellowish green and here I've got an orangey red and then I could not match that. I just couldn't. It's nearly impossible to match color in gouache a second time to get the exact same color. This guy caused me a lot of headache too. I was trying to make the shadows across the road. The first pass of that didn't work very well. So I had to all just paint the road out again, paint over it and then it got really mushy. Like something strange happened. So it was possible to recover it but then the road lost the earlier character that it had. I wish I could show you that that it looked better at one point than it does here. Little parrot had some issues with trying to paint that white in the face because I kept pulling in some of the black that was surrounding it. I should have done the white first, but I didn't do that. I did not at least paint the bird over top of the green. I had learned that by then. And the same thing with the panda. I did not paint him on top of the tree but I still had trouble because every time I added some gray if I got it too dark I'd have to paint white over it. So it's very thick. You can actually feel the paint with your finger. There's so much on it. It feels more like acrylic than it does gouache. The other thing to happen here was I had some funny colors in my greens that were over in here and I thought, well, let me just paint through that and I couldn't match that color. So I ended up having to repaint the whole tree which led to having to refix the ears and all the edges of the panda. So when you have to change a color midstream you just cause all kinds of trouble for yourself. This one is more in the traditional trendy style of gouache. There's very graphic types of shapes. Mine are probably looser than what a lot of people will do. But I wanted to see what would happen. I just painted all the green, the dark green first and then painted all the light greens on top and I left my flowers white so I could then add in all of that bluish purple-ish kind of color. That's not a style though that's really me because it feels kind of cartoony-ish and this felt the same by the time I got done. I was excited to finally have a medium that I could paint this in. I've seen this photograph over at Paint My Photo for so long and I could never figure out how to do all those little flowerettes on the cactus and I thought gouache would be great but I made them too bright. So now it looks kind of cartoony-ish after I spent enormous amounts of time trying to make the background blends. I found that really difficult and this is my cartoony-ish looking out of the tube painted colors for a landscape. I've seen a lot of gouache painters use paint exactly right out of the tube or the pan or whatever they get their gouache in and you see kind of fake-ish looking colors. If you compare that to the colors of this, these were all mixed greens and they were mixed individually so that I could get the colors that were in the photograph. This I decided to just try working with the tube colors alone and I didn't like that nearly as much. I mean, the painting is still nice but the colors just didn't sing for me. There is no purple in the Daniel Smith set so if you're into purple, you might wanna buy a purple but I was able to mix purple after lots of trial and error. I had a lot of trouble though figuring out how to paint a blue-green teal color. That was not as successful. I wanted something that would just look kind of like that light, fresh color that you get on those containers of fruits but so much for that. I did a lot of value studying in this whole experiment that I wasn't expecting to necessarily be doing. gouache revised a lot more on determining your values correctly to look right and in watercolor, I can just keep washing over something and just keep adding a little glaze of something to change a color. But here, I just kept making the buildings too light. They just looked too whitish and it wasn't until I figured out that that color out there was the color of the roofs and they're still gonna look like they're light buildings but they needed to be that color because of the lighting. And here was another place where value made a huge difference. I started off thinking the sky up here was white in the photograph that I was working from and it was actually lighter than this but it was not white because the sun was so white and that was so white that the two were clashing that that was fighting for attention and I wanted the attention pulled down to the sun. As soon as I dulled that down, it was like amazing that all the attention started focusing in here. Now I'm gonna give you a second while I talk to see what is wrong with this painting. Where are the shadows off? Because something is very wrong here. I painted the background first and then I painted all of the fence line and then I added in all these shadows and I was so happy with the shadows and wasn't that great? Well, the shadow color here should have been the shadow color here. I didn't do that. I was so excited about these shadows I totally did not add those in. So I think I'm gonna do that before I put this in the auction. So stay tuned for information on the auction in a moment. This one was an attempt at changing value when I didn't have a reference. The reference that I had was a daytime picture of snow in this cabin and I wanted to make it dusk. I wanted to see if I could do that and I thought, oh, I'll just make it kind of a purplish color, wouldn't that be great? And I guessed at what the value of the roof would be and I guessed at what the value here would be and it just never quite felt right. But once I had put that value in for the roof and then I put the trees in, there was no going back. I couldn't go back and change that because I'd have to be changing all of that and then repaint these and I had learned that fixing things was not as easy as I thought it was gonna be. Now, another thing that's interesting is it's opaque watercolor so you can use it more like watercolor. So some of my backgrounds, I started painting with my fancy big brushes using the paint more like watercolor and just letting it get really wet and mushy and it makes beautiful clouds that way and the bottom clouds were done more with brush strokes and this was done much more with just pushing the paint in and letting it do kind of what it wanted to do. I used my little itty bitty brush for all the detail in the boat. This one is another one that used a lot of the paint like watercolor and it was more due to not knowing what I was doing because I wasn't really sure where to go with this. I was trying to get the right colors and trying to figure out how to get a blend to go around this and ended up using too much water and I kept lifting colors from underneath. Same thing had happened with the background, lifting colors underneath. The background, I finally just let it go and I just allowed it to be which turns out to be perfectly mushy and all the rocks didn't need to be delineated. I was trying to make them all specific but as soon as I decided I'm just gonna let it go then I thought well what if I just put instead of trying to make these things blend just putting a brush stroke, a brush stroke, a brush stroke in different colors that are related to each other and built up the roundness that way and I also got the glow of the colors in the vase or the pot I guess, went from like yellowish at the bottom to grayish and I actually achieved that. So I'm pretty proud of this painting. It's probably one of my favorite out of this whole month. And then there's times when you just decide you're gonna let the brush strokes show and this is one of those cases. I wanted to see what would happen if I just let my messy brush strokes be there. Would it still read? And unless your nose is right up to the paper it actually looks really cool. The one thing I would change is not having all of this detail in there because that tells the viewer that there's that much detail there but there's not that much detail here. So I'm not really positive about the pairing of those but such is life, right? We learn from every painting. And here is another that I learned a lot from because I was trying to see if I could not use any tiny brushwork, no tiny brush. I'm trying to see if I can get to the point where I'm using bigger brushes, bigger strokes and making things simpler. And that's what I did here and I'm pretty proud of how that came out. I really wanted to use it on the grasses and I withheld from letting myself do that. This is one of my other favorite paintings and what I ended up doing here was a wash, a very, very mushy wet watercolor wash around the outside. And then I started putting in the details of the architecture and all that kind of thing. I did end up leaving that white originally and had to repaint some because I tried going in and fixing things but fixing things is always my nemesis but I do like the direction that I was trying here and I was pretty proud of myself for making that effort. Now these two paintings are something that I'm gonna be addressing in the demo in just a minute and what I wanted to talk about was muddiness and the thing that was just my big problem throughout my month of painting was using too much water. So on this one, I painted the whole background in blue and then I added the octopus on top and it kept picking up all of that blue color underneath. So instead of having a fresh peachy color, I got this kind of brownish peach and even on this place where I got brighter highlights, I just never achieved the kind of fresh peach color that I was looking for. So I wasn't happy with it and I just added bubbles because it was what it was. And then this one, even though I know that it looks gorgeous having all of these cherries look like they're glassy and that's lovely because they have the little sparkles on them, the color in here is not what it should have been because I ended up picking up some of the green from my palette and it got into the oranges and the yellows and the reds that I was painting with. And in here, I even dragged some of that green because I painted the stems too early and I dragged some green into the cherry. So this has muddy color even though I know nobody online could see it and you may not be able to see it here but it has some muddiness in it that I want to try to avoid and I'm gonna give you some tips on how to avoid that in your paintings. Last but not least is my buzzard and you may have seen him in a YouTube short. He was painted on top of stamped lines and then I had to paint all the detailing myself because I didn't have the lines left anymore. They all disappeared under the gouache. I'm not sure I would recommend gouache for stampers to color in stamps with but this guy is gonna be in an auction and I wanna let you know that. It's a separate auction from my auction. The auction that this is gonna be in is a card auction in which this other card which you probably have seen here on YouTube as a short it's a watercolor card, not gouache but both of these are in the Turner syndrome auction. I'll put a link to that in the doobly-doo. That auction starts tomorrow and it's all throughout the month of February and there's cards from people all over the place and see all the details on that page. The rest of these are going to be in an auction on my website and so you will get to see all of these lovely paintings over there in still pictures so I'm not even gonna post them on my blog, I'll just post maybe a couple of them but they're all going to be in an auction for World Central Kitchen and you can bid on any one of these paintings that you have seen because they will all be there for the auction. This is gonna be a shorter auction just so I can get these in the mail to people. This auction is going to be longer at this last throughout the month of February so go make your bids on either one of these. Links are of course in the doobly-doo for both auctions. Now I wanted to do a demo and I came up with an idea to make the very simplest demo possible to illustrate for you what I had learned as my biggest thing. So I am taking some red, this is pyrrole red and basically using out of the tube thickness like just really thick paint and you get a real dry brush look which sometimes you want so remember that but if you put just a little water in it and get it to move without getting it so watery that it's watercolor then you can end up getting a much smoother kind of brush stroke and so I found myself this entire month just playing around constantly with adding just a tiny bit of water. How little could I dip my brush in the water to get just a tiny drop and then sometimes I would even paint the drop of water onto the palette and then pull in a little bit of it just so I could get just the right amount. It does take a long time to get used to that so even after a month I am incapable of getting the perfect mix on the first try and when you end up with something like this you'll be able to see the difference between the solid paint that I put down in that first stroke and then the water coloriness of the rest it didn't come out smooth because I didn't get that color consistent I didn't get my puddle of paint mixed to exactly the right mixture and the right amount of water that would be consistent across that whole background. Now, I took some white paint tried to paint white over top on top of this I'm trying to make a vase and I could not get this white to be really solid and even when I started painting in there with wetter paint to try to blend it better because it got kind of chunky the water then starts picking up the color from underneath and you can just start seeing that red coming through it just happened to me over and over and over again and I thought, well, I wanna put some shading into the vase so maybe some shading will fix it, right? And this was my thought process the whole time maybe I'll do something to distract from the thing that just happened and here I am trying to get that gray to distract from the fact that the white is not white by painting the gray maybe the contrast with that in the two of them is gonna help so I'm squishing out as much of my water as possible and I'm gonna get my black so that it will work so that it will move well and I got it too wet because you can see the red through it so all the colors when you have them too wet on top of another color are gonna show the color through that's underneath that very rarely are you going to end up painting a vase of flowers on a red background but I'm using an extreme example just so you can see what happens if you have a yellow background or a blue sky behind something and you're trying to paint something on top of it it's just gonna take a lot to get to the point where you're not seeing the color come through from underneath especially if your paint is too wet. So now that the vase was dried I switched brushes and started painting in a stronger white highlight you can put a second coat and a third coat and an eighth coat and a twelfth coat let me tell you and I thought okay well that worked I got it looking a little bit whiter so let me use a little thinner paint so I can start blending it a bit with the gray and look the red just came shining right on through it did not take but a stroke of any kind of paint that's too wet and I'm so used to watercolor that I'm used to constantly rinsing my brush and getting more water in there to get the color moving and it was just a struggle the whole time the whole month. I started getting the hang of it a little bit better toward the end but it was still like a lesson that I was learning over and over and over again and now with painting in yellow flowers depending on how thick you want the paint you might be able to do okay but you can see I've already pulled in some red into the yellow puddle because it picks up everything that's underneath of it. What if I try to paint purple flowers over top painting purple flowers and that's picking up color. There's three greens in this and as I talked about in previously the greens are not necessarily the greatest colors for looking very natural so I'm just gonna use them straight on here but they're transparent enough or picking up enough color it's hard sometimes to know which it is that these colors are looking very dark compared to what they should. Now let's look at what I would recommend for a little painting like this and this is gonna be a quick doodle it's not really a full painting like the ones I had showed you earlier on this postcards but what I do is just give myself the general outlines of chunks of the painting and then I block in color and the blocked in color is either a dark or a mid-tone and if it's gonna be painted over I would even just make it a wash just a watercolor-ish wash can be very light and doesn't have to be perfect just get some color in there so that the paper is no longer white and you're painting on top of something but in this particular case since I wanna have the flowers be nice and bright they're gonna be brighter on white paper than they are gonna be on top of that red. Other choice would be of course to use a lighter color for the background and then you can paint over top of that more easily just any color though will contaminate if you use two wet of colors on top. So for the vase, I'm gonna mix some grays and one of the things that I've started to really experiment with and actually really enjoyed is using wash a little bit more like oils and in oil paints if you look at the old masters paintings you'll see that when they were doing a transition of color if somebody was doing a transition on this vase going from this kind of a gray into a lighter gray to a lighter gray to a lighter gray to white they just keep adding more white and then doing some strokes next to the darker area and then they'd make a lighter color and then more strokes next to it not trying to blend it the way you would with pencil or with marker but just trying to let the eye do the transformation of the color and let the paints just kind of crisscross each other so that you eventually get to that place where it looks rounded even if it's just a bunch of brush strokes and if you go to my website where the auction is and you can look at each individual painting you can see them larger and see how I handled some of those transitions of color. Now when it comes to the flowers if you want to block in some of those lighter colors and just get the yellows marked in just so that you don't overtake everything and then you have to fight yellow going over green you could block those yellows in and that's what I decided to do and I've got my three greens here but in order to make them not standard out of the tube greens I'm gonna mix them with a warm yellow you could also mix them with a cool yellow you can mix them with white you can mix a little bit of ultramarine blue or something in them to change them so they're not just out of the tube colors and I like using this really warm sunshiney kind of yellow with it because it'll give you more of an olive color and the paints out of the tube just don't look a whole lot like leaves that you might see necessarily in evasive flowers they're intended to be mixed with colors if you're trying to do something it's realistic now if you were doing this on white then you could sit here and paint leaves to your heart's content add flowers in between and if you have white spaces in between on a vase like that it's perfectly fine because it feels like you're seeing through to the wall on the other side but in this case if you just have a bunch of white gaps then you're gonna have a bunch of white gaps and it won't look like you've painted flowers on a red background at least it won't look realistic and if you want to paint that graphical style by all means do that I'm not saying that that's a bad thing it's just not my style I like more realism but what I would take as an approach to something like this is to paint in kind of a cloud of green like almost a watercolor wash of green starting at the bottom of the flowers because if you look at a flower vase that whole bottom section until it starts to open up and you have gaps between flowers that whole bottom is gonna be very dense in color so I've mixed a very watercolor just put a lot of water into the green and I'm gonna fill in a bunch of these areas at the bottom now and if I were doing this without having painted all those leaves first I would just do this right out the gate to just put that green wash down not all the way to the top because when you get to the top we're gonna have some gaps we're gonna paint some red in between there so that it looks like you're seeing through to the wall but this is just one way around that so that we can get some color in here and eliminate some of those white gaps that might feel kind of awkward and now that that's all dried I can start painting in some more flowers so I'm gonna paint in the purple flowers that I had started on the other ones using wisteria and then I'm mixing up a second little bit of wisteria along with some ultramarine blue so I can have multicolors in my flowers and I'm just gonna paint the darker color first so that the lighter color can sit on top and I'm gonna fill in some of these gaps that I've left so far with flowers just painting long skinny flowers I'm thinking lilacs or snapdragons or something like that and then I'm just gonna pop a little bit of that lighter wisteria color on top now I'm gonna go through with lighter colors still as I start to build the flowers in the UK but for now I'm just gonna go with a lighter mid-tone that's where I'm considering this in my brain a lighter mid-tone if you wanna start with a deep dark purple and then do that secondary color and then the wisteria straight up you can do that too you can go as contrasting as you would like just remembering that each of your successive layers on top needs to be a little bit thicker so that it doesn't just kind of pull the color from underneath forward now I'm painting a few dollops of red in here before I get too far because once those dollops of red are in there you get the idea that you can see through right now the red looks like it's on top because it is on top, it's painted on top you wanna do this before you get to your final layers because once that's there as we paint the final layers we'll crisscross over some of the red spots and that's going to help to make them look like they are really in the background, not in the foreground so now I've mixed white with my yellow and the yellow underneath was kind of placeholder just so I have a nice place to paint a good yellow flower on top of yellow paint instead of painting it on top of the red or on top of green if I had just painted that whole bouquet in green then I would still be fighting green underneath of it but now I'm just fighting yellow underneath and then I'm gonna mix a little bit of the red with my yellow to make centers for the flowers and I'm trying to stick with one palette of colors just as few as possible that are on my palette the fewer colors you use the easier your life's gonna be and then mixed some lighter color for the purple flowers so some white with the wisteria to pull that in you can either take the wisteria and dump it onto the puddle of white or vice versa depending on how white or how purple you want it and I like having a selection of different hues or different values of each hue sometimes because that gives me options for which puddle I'm gonna pull from for each little dot of paint that I'm adding in so you can see as I'm adding lighter colors I'm getting more detail in the bouquet itself and I'm not painting individual flowers and stuff this is as I said not the kind of painting that I did earlier with that kind of detail I just wanted to give you the idea of the order in which you can think about painting something like this it's just very different if you're used to painting with watercolor or if you use pencil or markers or something that's more transparent this is more like an oil painting process in your brain so some of the things that you've always known and always done you'll find yourself doing I did that all throughout the month on a regular basis but you can overcome those by just remembering a few things about gouache that it's opaque and it can be transparent though and if you use too much water then that's why your colors may get muddy so I've painted some mid-tone greens already over top of those darker greens that I had started with and then I can go in with some even lighter greens just mix a lighter color and start to brighten up the entire thing and I'm getting rid of any of that color that may have felt like it was out of the tube because all the colors on top are starting to be ones that are full of mixtures of a couple of different colors in order to create them so there's the difference between the two vases and some of you might see the one on the left and go that's what I wanna do and you can do that absolutely. I'm not gonna go that direction with my gouache I'm gonna try for more realism. Now this painting is over for my patrons that was the painting for today the 31st and so they get to see that one and on Saturday I'm gonna paint this one for you so do come back and visit in order to see that one is a real-time painting. Thank you so much for joining me for this video I really appreciate you being here I appreciate your likes that you drop on this video as well as your comments and your questions if you have questions about gouache that I have not yet answered and I'll link to my other gouache video down below then leave me a comment and I will be doing further research and learning more about the medium and hopefully I can discover the answer to your question as well for a future video. Thank you so much make sure you have taken care of getting subscribed to my channel and I will see you again on Saturday with that real-time gouache painting go out there and create something every day.