 Hello there, welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok. And if we haven't met yet, hey, welcome. Glad you're here. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums and I love to teach. I love to enable you to grow in your art. So please feel free to scroll through some of the playlists here on YouTube or you can join me for a class and do a deeper dive into something you're interested in learning. Today I'm gonna be talking about gouache and I wanted to put this portion up front rather than making it a PS at the end. The rest of this video was shot and voiced over a week ago. And I've had a week to start working with gouache and I wanted to clarify some things that I know are gonna be questions as we get into paliting and starting to paint the swatches. And that is, is this the right way to work with gouache? Are you supposed to palette your paints? And I'm gonna suggest that maybe that's not the case but I did that specifically because since I was gonna be doing a daily deep dive, I'm painting every single day in gouache this month on my Fine Art Instagram channel. Since I'm doing that, I'm going to really be learning a lot and I'm going to be mixing a lot of these colors. And I wanted to have everything out at the same time. So I wouldn't have to be squeezing everything out onto a palette, which is the way many, many gouache artists work, not by having them in a palette. So don't take the fact that I'm paliting as a mandatory thing, although by the end of this month, I'm gonna have more information on whether or not that's something that I recommend. And I'm also gonna go through all of the paintings that I did during this month and share them with you and what I learned from each one of them. So in February, keep an eye out for that one. All of those paintings are also going to be on my Fine Art website. So if you wanna get your hands on what a gouache painting looks like, you'll be able to purchase one of those postcards. And just for a quick sample, these are some of the ones that I have painted this week so far. Now bear in mind that I am a professional artist. I do this all the time. This is just a different medium. It's just a different tool. And once you start developing as an artist, you'll be able to jump from one tool to another. So today, this is just a scratching the surface video about gouache. Well, let's get started. I have avoided gouache like the plague because I had it in my head that gouache is just like acrylic. I didn't know much about it. I didn't bother to look into it because I love watercolor. So why do I need gouache in my life, right? Well, the good people at Daniel Smith decided to challenge me and they sent me the full set so I can't really resist trying them. And I'm doing something over on Instagram on my fine art Instagram account where I'm gonna do a painting a day for the month of January. I'm gonna see if I learn how to use these or not. I got this palette specifically because it was a YouTuber who did some really solid testing. She used a whole bunch of different airtight palettes to try to see which one worked best and which one kept the paints fresh longest. And this one won. I've seen it with a whole bunch of different names to it. There's all different kinds of companies so I think the manufacturer just kind of whitelisted it and there's a whole bunch of companies that then put it out. So first I'm gonna fill the gouache palette. And gouache paints, the reason that you want them in an airtight type of palette is because when you use gouache, if you're gonna use it opaquely, which is I think the best way to use them from what I see, because if you don't use them opaquely, why wouldn't you just use watercolor? Like just take advantage of the opacity if you're going to use these. Anyway, you can use these like watercolor, but when you're mixing them and you're trying to get that opacity, if you wait and let them dry the way a watercolor palette would, then you don't really end up getting that nice creaminess very easily. I think you can get it. And I haven't messed around with these at the time that I'm filming this video because obviously I'm just putting the paints in them. And it would take a couple of weeks in this palette at least for them to dry. And it could be longer. The woman who did the testing had some that started drying out and getting a film across the top of them like within a day or two. And then she tested them over like a week and then a couple of weeks, et cetera. Out of these pigments, everything squeezed out really nicely into the palette except for the Wisteria and Lavender. Those two on the left, they came out a little bit drier. So I suspect they may be, there might be some reason why. And it could be a property of the pigment. I really have no idea. I have not researched that. I'm just at the beginning of my gouache journey, but I'm going to put all of these colors in here. And the colors paint the same way that they're in the palette itself. So you don't actually need a swatch card or something to put with your palette unless you want the names of them. That might be helpful to have that, but you could just put a little piece of tape on the bottom of the palette itself, which is what I might do. So I don't remember what color names if I try to tell somebody what I was using. And I did them all roughly in order, except I put the white by itself because white contaminates so easily. This particular palette seals that little rubber thing, seals it so that no paints will, if you turn it upside down, won't leak into each other. But I just like to keep it separate, like off to the side in any palette, whatever kind of white paint it is, if I ever had white paint in my palettes, it was always just segregated so that nothing would get into it. So in swatching these, the thing that I wanted to practice was the mixture and getting that creamy mixture because that's what all the videos say is that you need to practice that creamy mixture and have the right amount of movement to it, but also thick enough paint that it stays really opaque because otherwise it gets washy. Like I said, you can use these as watercolor. They're made the same way. Daniel Smith does the same kind of whatever they do with them. The colors will match if you're using them with watercolor so you can use them together. You can use just a little bit of some of these if you like to paint white flowers and you wanna use white gouache on top, you can do that and lots of different possibilities for using them. If you saw the short that I posted yesterday, I will have a little snippet of that at the end so you get to see the card that I made in that one using it with a stamp because when you use something opaquely, everything underneath disappears. So if you have a sketch underneath, then you'll need to re-sketch on top of whatever if you paint a full background across something and then you wanna paint your image, your trees and your mountains, opaquely on top, you have to redraw them or just draw them from memory or whatever because opaque means you can't see anything under it. So there's all different techniques that you might consider if you wanna use watercolor first so your pencil lines stay visible or your stamp lines stay visible and then add more to it. I'm gonna be experimenting in the coming months to see if I find that these are useful for stamping or not for the card makers among us but I am gonna be having fun, I've already been having fun creating some reels and still pictures and stuff for my challenge that I've given myself to do 31 days of painting with gouache. I saw somebody do this in her shorts, she had just a whole bunch of shorts that she did and I don't think I'm gonna put them all here on YouTube but I will do a kind of recap when I get to the end of the month and tell you what I've learned, I'll do another painting on here on YouTube and talk about the process that I find that works best because I've just been experimenting so far. I've come out with some things that are quite nice, I'm pleased with them and that sort of thing but I could paint the same things that I've painted so far in gouache, I could paint them in watercolor twice as fast and I'd get a very loose effect to them so now I'm getting this very tight, very crisp kind of a look as I'm using more opacity but I don't know what I'll end up doing with these and whether the month will convince me that I wanna do a lot more with gouache, I really have no idea and I'll also know by then whether this palette stays the way it is, I didn't fill the entire little wells with color, I only used maybe a third of the tube or something to put that much in there because if they do dry out then I still have paint left in the tube but there are some other gouaches that come in little cups and like the full thing is in the cup, they don't come in tubes, they just come in little like jello cup things, they look like little pudding cups and they have just a lid over the whole thing so there's lots of different types of gouache that types of formats that it comes in so I will be able to report back on whether or not this is a good format or not but I do have my swatches over on the blog but you can see the colors are the same so I was swatching not as much for color as I was swatching for how thick to make the paint and just to get some practice doing that so I promised a word on the card, this is the turkey vulture or buzzard as Art Impressions had called him back 15 years ago or whenever it was that I bought the stamp and he was fun to paint even if he lost the lines and I had to figure out where to put all the feathers in on my own invented that part myself but using the paint that's on that tile that was paint that dried completely and was reconstituted I put more water in it with my brush and it rewets just like watercolor does so it's not like acrylic that kind of freezes in place when it dries on a palette so I kind of like that about gouache that made me feel better about it if you wanna see the full video on this over on my Patreon page just go become a member over there so the reason that I got this guy out at all was because there was a card made with this stamp set in the clean and simple design class in the old samples so I pulled samples of my cards from 2013, 2012 like way long ago and remade them, remade the designs not using those stamps so I didn't use him this is not for that class but I also wanted to say I have a controversial opinion in there in lesson one that you'll get to hear about about what actually is clean and simple can you use layers on a clean and simple card? My vote is yes so go take the class and get into the debate with me about clean and simple cards and learn some design tips along the way have a great weekend go make something every day just a little something and I'll see you next week bye-bye