Gouache – Walk Draw Explore

Hi,
So as mentioned before, I get serious creative blocks ATM and end up procrastinating around them rather then trying to start a painting. HOWEVER! I have tried to make them useful for a future where I am painting more again and have been creating colour charts for my different paint sets. I currently have a selection of tubes and pans from the Winsor and Newton Cotman range, as well as the Winsor and Newton designer gouache set of 10 colours. I also have a 48 watercolour pan set from Sennelier which I needed to test out fully. It’s a beautiful set and I mainly went on colour instinct when I was choosing my colours from it, which seems like quite a waste. To better plan my paintings I wanted to have a good overview of how the colours mixed with each other and doing a full colour chart looked like the best way to do this.

I am halfway through the watercolour charts but I have finished the gouache one which I’m posting here ( mistakes and all!)
I really like this set as you get such a vibrant range of colours but can easily tone them down. I used this set for my first attempts at plein air painting in 2016 and again at Gelts woods ( which you can see here. They were good as gouache can easily be layered and highlights can be added in later, which eased some of my nerves and allowed me to just have fun with sloshing paint around!)

Winsor and Newton designer gouache colour palette

Within this set you get

Zinc white
Primary yellow
Permanent yellow deep
Yellow ochre
Spectrum red
Primary red
Permanent green middle
Primary blue
Ultramarine
Ivory black

The primary colours they developed mixed nicely with each other greeting these beautiful clean colours. I have tried all the other combinations yet but you can see that mixing Ultramarine with primary red still makes a strong clean violet. You can create some nice olive greens with ivory black and primary yellow or Ultramarine blue. Mixing all the colours with the zinc white produces some lovely pastel colours as well. Using these on coloured paper would look beautiful.
I have also used this set to create a gift box for my niece and the colours painted beautifully onto a hobby craft cardboard gift box and dried nicely. As you can see, she’s rather fond of the trolls movie and anything colourful so these paints were perfect!

Derby Museum and Gallery did a call out for artworks responding to the theme EVERYONE – Your place in the world. I have never responded to an artist call out before and I felt that this would be a lovely starter exhibition to enter.

As I want to develop my place to be outside painting, I chose an area of Derbyshire that I particularly liked, Dovedale in Ilam and created a design from a photo I recently took there. Obviously lots of deep thought going on for the idea behind this piece! Sometimes it’s nice just to paint your view of a place, which is what I set out to do here.

I sketched two designs first to give myself some practice and generate how I wanted the scene to look. The top once was too cold but quite cold to the actual colours, and the bottom one was a tad too psychadelic but I liked the idea of addng characters to the composition to give the view someone to connect to. I then sketched the design onto canvas! I’ve included below my rouch sketchbook pages to see the process i went through. Nothing very complicated but it helped to get my thoughts in order and I could figure out what colours mixed well with others and how I could eliminate other colour options that would ruin the balance of the piece.

I used Gouache as my medium as i’m used to watercolours but I want to learn more about how to layer opaque paints, making Gouache the perfect middle ground. They were very easy to wipe off though at the beginning when I was adding new layers but eventually I got my under painting to how I wanted the colour structure to go.

From there I just kept on refining the detail! I wish I had a good reference for a person in this kind of light but ended up having to work from memory and imagination ( dangerous combo when trying to get things looking realistic! ) and the final piece didn’t look too odd thankfully. I used some interactive acrylics for some colours I couldn’t make with my Gouache and for some of the whites.

Walk Draw Explore

Tag: Gouache

Colour play – Winsor and Newton designer gouache

Derby Museums Exhibition: EVERYONE