 Are you ready to learn a new exciting discovery I just made using gouache paint and soft pastels? Well in this video I'm gonna show you my new technique where I use gouache paint in combination with soft pastels on a colored pastel surface and I'll be applying the underpainting with gouache paint and the reason I decided to use gouache paint on a colored surface is because it's opaque much like acrylic paint and it will show up on a colored surface. I love this technique I can't wait to show it to you so come on in the studio as we create this moody Florida Marsh scene. You may be wondering what the heck is gouache? Well pronounced very much like squash the vegetable it's a medium that I love and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about it. I'm gonna use this little video clip from the American Crafts YouTube channel I think she did a great job with this. gouache is a painting product that you use with water much like watercolor or acrylic and it acts very similar to watercolor but it is more opaque that's why it works on the colored surface I'll be showing you and I also love the fact that you can use gouache on any sturdy paper you don't even have to have watercolor paper so it's very versatile too and it's also very travel friendly I love that you can mix so many colors and you don't need that many colors to get started because they're mixable. I also love that you have some control over how opaque or transparent the paint will be opaque just means it's not see-through but if you add more water to the gouache paint you can see you can make it more transparent and like she says here and opaque again so you've got a lot of versatility. gouache paint has something else in common with watercolor in that you can actually let the paint dry and kind of reconstituted by adding water again I'm gonna show to my patrons on my patreon channel my own personal palette that I have created with my own set of gouache paints all right you know a little bit more about gouache paint let me show you the product that I'll be using I had the Arteza company gift me quite a few products one of them was the 60 set of gouache paints oh my goodness this is a lot of colors for a mixable type of paint you do not need this many colors but I was very grateful to get this set so what I did was arrange some of the colors not this many and I made my own little palette you can see the little paper up there with all of my colors on it and I made my own little palette from a watercolor empty palette tray and again if you're a patron of mine on my patreon page you're gonna have some additional extra footage at the end of your version of this video where I tell you a little bit more about how I did this all right let's start painting and here was my little test painting to make sure this worked I put some gouache down on a piece of sanded pastel paper it's a paper made by Art Spectrum it's called Color Fix and it's a green beautiful green mossy green color and if I had put watercolor or say acrylic ink down on this green surface it wouldn't have even shown up that's because watercolor and acrylic ink are transparent but as you already know now because of earlier in this video gouache paint is opaque it means it is not transparent so it will show up on colored surfaces so this was my little test I was happy with it and now it's time to start the painting the theme this month has been marsh paintings and I absolutely loved this gorgeous marsh from unsplash.com thank you to Niles Leonhart the photographer of this and it actually reminded me of some of the marshes around where I live in Florida and because there was so much green in that reference image I chose a reddish orange color from the Art Spectrum Color Fix warm pack they have these beautiful warm colors in this pack and I think this is a fairly affordable surface if you're wanting to get started in soft pastels and you'd like to try a sanded surface I really like their warm pack and their cool pack and now it's time to get started applying the gouache as I mentioned before I have this little palette that I've created it was an empty watercolor palette I added all my gouache paints and they have of course dried up because it's a long time ago that I added these to this palette but as you've already learned they can be reconstituted with water just like dried watercolor paints can do the same thing so let me show you what I mean here you'll see me just using some clean water and a brush to just swirl some of this water around in one of the little color cubicles this pretty blue and you'll see that it really does come back to life very easily and while I'm sharing this footage of just getting the color reactivated again I wanted to let you know and reiterate you do not have to have this many colors if you want to play around with gouache painting if you just want to you know experiment with gouache painting alone you don't need this many colors because it's mixable this is a mixable medium I will add a product to the description of this video I think it's a Windsor yeah Windsor Newton set it's like five or seven tubes of gouache paint and you could totally get started with a much more limited supply of gouache paints and now I'll be creating my under painting prior to adding my pastel using this gouache paint and what I'm gonna do is make me some little puddles or some pretty big puddles of color I don't want to have to go and swirl around every time I want to grab some paint so I'm just using this brush and some water and adding little areas of color and I decided again the reference image is very very green I've already got a nice warm color that's a compliment to the green so rather than going for greens right away I'm gonna hold off on that and use my soft pastels for my final greens but for this under painting using gouache paint I'm going to use some of these beautiful cooler colors and even cooler greens I'm not gonna use like warm mossy greens like you see or lemony yellow greens like you see in the reference image so I've just got some cooler greens purple magentas those types of colors for my under painting now I want to mention that I'm using this small brush just to make these little puddles because my bigger brush that I'm gonna use to paint is not gonna be able to fit in those little sections so that's why I start off with a small brush here but you'll see me move to the large brush when I start painting when I also added this pretty blue I'm gonna be using this for some of the water in the scene I have my surface taped up to my board with artist tape and I like that color fix has actually a nice white little border around the perimeter and so when you're done with a painting if you tape it off like I did here over that white border you get a nice clean white border when you're done I really love that all right so the brush that I used is a brush that I've actually used this and I think the past two videos you don't have to use this brush but a brush that's got a fairly wide fairly wide bristles and I actually even use a larger brush you'll see in a little while so what I'm doing is I'm just using this brush with the gouache paint to apply my big shapes and values and that's a stage called blocking in and I love during the blocking in stage to use creative color and different mediums I think it provides some nice loose effects and I think it's just a lot of fun and I'm speeding this up but I actually think you get the idea better sometimes when I speed things up you can kind of see the whole rather than just sitting monotonously through a real slow process all right so I have switched to a larger brush now and I don't even remember the name of this brush I'm going to hold it up so that you can see it it's um anybody know the name of this brush I can't remember but it worked really well for this again this brush wouldn't have fit in my little wells of color so that's why I had to make my little puddles and I do prefer or I know I will prefer working with wet gouache paint for this technique versus the dry I think the wet paint is just a little easier to work with I can get a a more opaque consistency versus having to bring the dried gouache paint back to life so to speak and you'll notice at the end when this dries it actually dries lighter than you're seeing right now and again that's why I believe if I use the wet gouache paint I can get a more opaque application and it won't dry quite as light but I was super happy with this technique and I was thinking back I think I might have tried this a hundred years ago or so no probably a few years back but I never did it in this way like an under painting and I definitely love this medium on a colored surface again you could use it on a white surface of course but then again you could use watercolor on a white surface you could use acrylic ink but if you want to do an under painting on a colored surface you're gonna need to stick to mediums like gouache or acrylic paint you can thin down acrylic paint and do the same thing you can actually thin down oil paint and do this alright let me talk about this process I want you to squint your eyes as I'm doing this squint your eyes and look at the reference image to the lower right and can you see where the darks are there's really some a lot of darks in the upper left corner and the lower right corner really there's a nice perimeter almost like any lips of darks around and then your lighter values are in the center in some middle values in there too so that's what I'm focusing on right now I zone out when I'm doing an under painting and I'm just looking at values and shapes that's it I want to get my I'm not even as concerned about color I like picking a question I get all the time is how do you know what color to paint an under painting well sometimes just go for it you know there's no hard and fast rule with it but I do have my own personal favorites and and ways that I do this and I mentioned some of it already I know this painting has a lot of greens in it so I'm gonna be using my pastels more for the greens therefore my under painting I wanted to have some fun color peeking through all of this green and I've already got the warm of the surface and now I've got some beautiful cool purples but what I think of is I think of a painting in layers and what is beneath all this green beneath all this green are deeper parts of the trees and everything and that's gonna be shadowy shadow colors are cooler purples and blues those colors will make a great base when I go to add my grades now you're gonna see the dried gouache painting you see it dried lighter but it still works fine these are pastels that I'm choosing from it's my little set it's actually a repurposed box of soft pastels that I used when I get done with a painting often I'll just loosely arrange them in that box by coloring value and it makes a great little palette to work with and as you can see I'm still creating a cool shadowy palette of color to begin with as I start to apply soft pastels you'll notice that I don't start to add greens until very near the end I'd say the last quarter of the painting is when I start adding my my greens especially my warm greens I do add some cooler greens so now I I've gotten in a little bit of that pretty blue that I started with and now I have a real pretty dark blue that I'm using to get some of these branches and with the branches I keep them very gestural and broken in places and I'm also creating the shadows or not the shadows the reflections of the branches within the water to reflections are just a mirror image I'm also creating you see some of those limbs and branches that are in the water it looks like maybe a tree has fallen over into the water so it has kind of a darker value there so I'm getting in some of the elements that are a bit a bit more specific I still don't go in and paint leaves or anything like that but when we're painting especially if you want to do impressionistic artwork we work big to small big shapes as you start out with like the blocking in stage that beginning gouache painting that I did was just some value and big shapes it's like a roadmap and then you just gradually start getting your elements in as loosely as possible and you don't get those final marks or distinctive marks till the very end of the painting and even try to be a little bit limited with detail in general because you want to save detail and high contrast and values for your focal point areas and that's why I say just keep it really loose and basic to begin with work the whole painting to try to avoid getting bogged down in any one area so I am still getting in these blues now there is a lighter value in the distance where that water is going around that little curve it was a little bit too light so I went back to another turquoise color and again I'm not using green I'm using cool or warm blues I should say a warm blue is like a turquoise a cool blue would lean more towards like a royal blue you think of a navy blue and a bit more towards periwinkle type of a color so this is a cooler blue that I'm using here and here's what's amazing to me this is blue in my hand right but notice the marks I'm making on the surface can you tell they look purple don't they look purple to you and it's it's an illusion basically and the reason that's happening is because what color is the surface underneath it's reddish right so what happens when you add blue and red you get purple and so that's why I often say some people say you can't mix soft pastels well you can't it's not a wet medium you can't mix it in that way but you can create these color illusions by how you layer color that's a perfect example how that blue became a purple just because I put it down lightly not real hard on to a reddish colored surface so now I'm creating some more of these reflections I want to get them kind of believable and if you have a problem with reflections turn your if you have your painting on a board turn it sideways and then just do the mirror image to the side rather than straight down it's a little bit easier that way and so also too with reflections when I go to blend them in a minute you want to make sure you blend your reflections just straight down if you use a little blending tool or anything you're just gonna pull straight down you can even use the side of your finger or hand so now I am speeding this up quite a bit this is the limited edition version of this painting tutorial if you followed my channel for very long you know I have a patreon page and my patrons often get the full versions and this painting tutorial on my patreon page is almost all real-time I mean I go through everything step by step and it's only five dollars a month but not to worry if you can't afford the five dollars a month there are hundreds of free videos still here on the Monet cafe channel on YouTube so I do know we've got subscribers here on this Monet cafe channel there's one woman who is in Ukraine and we've messaged back and forth quite a bit she's painting and she's learning and she's just a beautiful soul and so I know there are people in places and in circumstances that it's it's the five dollars is even something that could be difficult so that's why I love having the free content but if you want a little bit more and you want to join a group of very fun artists and it's just a great community I get to see your work all the artists kind of communicate with each other it's really cool so I'll let you know how to do that haha and you can see I have started adding green this is my first green here that's kind of a little bit more of a mossy green I'm getting it into some of the shadowy areas of the trees and the leaves and groupings of leaves that are beneath that canopy of trees and I've gotten a little lighter now with a lighter green also to while I was jabbering I put in a darker kind of evergreen green into the foreground trees there if you go back a little bit you can see where I did that and that served as a nice darker cooler green before adding these light greens but you can see it's already starting to come together and now I'm finally starting to add some of my lightest greens and this scene was just so beautiful how the Sun was kind of peeking around like to from the left side just into those trees and onto that water and just creating beautiful light and warmth in those distant trees and bushes and so I think now you should be able to see this really starting to take shape and it all started with a gouache underpainting and I often get the question too is why do you do an underpainting if you cover it all up well actually I keep my strokes pretty light and there is still an influence of that underpainting peeking through in little areas so I loved using that pretty cool green there now also too your reflections will have some of the same color that's above the surface too so make sure you pull some of those colors down into the water as well and that really makes it come to life I think and now I'm really gonna speed up this last little bit of the painting you'll definitely see it taking shape and I'll share with you once again that if you want the full version you can become a patron of mine for only $5 and you can cancel it anytime by the way it's not like some kind of an annual contract or anything like that so here comes the light look at all this reflection and light peeking through here and this does totally remind me of many Marsh scenes in Florida I my whole family is from the mountains of North Carolina but I've lived in Florida most of my life and so I'm very familiar with these beautiful Marsh scenes and these are very much like my scenes near some of the rivers around us and the whole time I was getting the heebie jeebies while painting this because I'm I'm got a pretty big snake phobia and these look kind of like the Marshes where I would be maybe canoeing with family or friends and be a little bit nervous about some snakes falling out of trees things like that and of course there's alligators to you gotta be careful you know canoeing around in Florida Marsh areas and now let me show you the final I'm gonna show you my pastels I used a few more pastels than these but not many this was a very limited palette because I had put down all of those beautiful underpainting colors with gouache and I had that pretty red surface to begin with but here you can see that nice white border I was talking about when I pulled my tape off and this was very impressionistic and loose I really liked it and I really liked creating the underpainting with gouache paint on a colored surface I'll definitely be using that technique again please let me know if you learned something if you haven't subscribed I hope you will and consider becoming a patron and be part of my patreon family alright as always God bless and happy painting