Painting with Watercolour and Gouache

As well as working with oils I also like to work on paper using watercolour and gouache for my botanical painting and nature inspired pieces. Turns out I can achieve some of the same intricate detail and depth of colour as when I paint with oils, however the approach is very different as I do not include a background. Works on paper, I feel have a much fresher appeal with white space background and my paintings double up as elements which I can cut out digitally and use for all kinds of different projects, such as for making repeat patterns. More on that sort of thing at a later date....

I want to show you how I start my paintings and I am using a painting of magnolia as an example:

This piece is around 8" x 8" on hot pressed watercolour paper and I have used a range of White Nights watercolour with various brands of gouache including Caran D'ache, Winsor & Newton and Daler Rowney. Although I have created this piece on white paper I have still painted in the bright white areas and I have used a combination of home made titanium white gouache with Daler Rowney Permanent White Designers Gouache. If you are concerned about achieving the opacity with your white gouache I recommend the Daler Rowney. As for the home made variety, that's a post for another day!

I started my piece by drawing out the outline of my magnolia using a Derwent watercolour pencil which was Golden Brown. I did this because I wanted to wash it back as I went along, rather than have a graphite line which would look too harsh on the edge I felt. I then added a layer wash of watercolour.

Working in this way allows me to map out where colours are going and give the painting a first layer to work with. Much of the next stage is opaque, however some areas can be semi-opaque using gouache with a little extra water.

The second layer is where I add detail and shading, some of which is achieved using a mixture of watercolour and gouache. These paints interact well with each other as they are related, I like to think of them as cousins! The difference between the two is that watercolour is designed to be applied in transparent layers or a transparent wash. It's a transparent paint which needs water and the right amount of water is often where the true trickery lies for when getting it right. Gouache on the other hand is an opaque paint and is made up of pigment, Gum Arabic and chalk. Watercolour is made up of just the two ingredients of Gum Arabic and pigment. Gouache welcomes being applied in various ways and can be applied thickly or thinly.

As I have an oil painting background I find that blending colours using gouache not too different. Of course oils can take a long time to dry and there isn't this problem with gouache. If anything it dries too quickly, however you can re-wet the paint and continue to work with it, as well as add more paint. It can be fixed easily as if you make a mistake, you can more or less lift it off with water and re-paint the area. Generally gouache is a very versatile paint and the only disadvantage is if you were to accidentally spill on your painting, it would shift the paint and potentially ruin the piece!

The following images show you the progress of the painting and you can hopefully see how I have used white even though I have painted this piece on white paper:

This last image shows you my magnolia painting with a coloured background. I have digitally cut out the flowers and experimented with the different colours to see how it sets off the foreground.

More on gouache and watercolour to follow in future posts. I hope you have enjoyed this post and possibly learnt something. Thanks for looking!