Yap and Make! Episode 1: Gouache Pet Portraits
Welcome to a new series, called “Yap and Make!” In it, I’ll show you the process of an art project from start to finish - mistakes included!
In this first episode, I practice working in gouache. I’ve dabbled lightly with gouache. A few years ago I made this piece for my local bookstore for one of my art classes in college:
A group of people laying on the ground reading. In the middle there’s a green rug with Dog Eared Book’s tagline, “Books are meant to be loved”. At the center, the dog Lovey is curled up, sleeping.
For my first big project with gouache, I’m pretty pleased with the layout and color of the piece. If you look closely, there’s a lot of areas where I struggled with the consistency of the gouache. The paint looks streaky since I added too little water to the paint.
I learned from that piece that I needed more practice in general with gouache, as well as adding crayons and other materials to play with the textures.
You can watch me work on my pet portrait’s in my vlog (which is linked in the thumbnail)! Here in the blog, I’ll go into my mixed media testing a little more.
Test strip: gouache as the first layer.
The first test I did was paint a layer of gouache, and then drew various materials on top of it.
I was able to get some minor texture/coloration with the Copics, colored pencils, and the Col-Erase pencil. The Col-Erase pencil shows that your choice of color for the paint and the pencil is really important. The blue Col-Erase was more visible than the light green colored pencil.
I already knew that Poscas would be a great choice for gouache, but I was pleasantly surprised with the Tombow pens. I thought they would instantly gum up with the paint. I only had to clean them a little bit - other than that it glided on top of the paint!
Fineliners also worked well with the paint. I was a bit disappointed with the oil sticks! I was only able to completely mask the gouache with the stick. When I tried to do it lightly, it looked very muddled.
Test strip: gouache as second layer.
My second test was having the gouache go over my various materials. I did a single layer of gouache on the left, and two layers on the right.
The only interesting result from that test was with the oil stick. The gouache layer made the oil stick more crumbly/pebbled. With the second layer of the gouache, it started to mask some of the oil stick.
I hope you enjoyed my not very scientific research! One thing I didn’t test with these strips is varnish. When I was done painting my portraits, I put a light beeswax layer on top to deepen the colors and “seal” the painting. I quickly learned that the wax can cause the colored pencils to smear, so use with caution!
Overall, the materials I would use again are the Poscas and the pens. Copics weren’t really useful, and the oil sticks may have promise to them (in the right circumstances).
