Gie's a gouache

In the fields, Mixed media on paper
40x30cm

My favourite Saturday morning art group is back again, and while it will take a while to balance Friday evenings with Saturday mornings, it was exciting to be back - it's a great group of people and many of them have been going for a long time.

I'm keen on doing more work with oils but am not quite in the mood for that yet. So, I took my tubes of gouache along - I got them as a present early in summer but still haven't tried them out - what have I been missing!

It's funny how some media just feel right straight away and others just don't. From pastels I moved to acrylics and I remember vividly the intense frustration when everything just ended up as muddy, plasticky grey. In constrast, oil paints were just a revelation - their luminosity, the various oils and assorted accompaniments to go with them (even smelly turps) just add to the experience.

So, gouache has been a plan to pursue for a good while - really as a means to keep mixing media with pastels, and there's plenty of artists who did precisely that - mainly Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas - to which I won't link now but make a mental note of yet another draft folder file.

High pigment load and their ability to mix, remix and keep playing with makes gouache an exciting water-based medium. Their opaqueness (or is it opacity?) makes them ideal as underpainting for pastels - just see in the sketch above in particular with the blues and magenta where the intensity of hue would be difficult to achieve solely based on pastels.

The painting is based on one of my outdoors sketches at my parent's place.... low in a field of grasses with a high horizon lines made up of trees - some cobalt blue would have been better for the sky, but there is always another time. The mixed media are gouache, acrylic ink and pastel.

Here's to new paintings and explorations.