Hey, Watercolor Wizards! Hajra here! In this video I'm going to be covering how to do a project in watercolor and
also the same project in gouache, so you can see the differences between the
two different kinds of water media. The drawing that I will be painting is from
a Henry Clive painting from the early 1900s, and he's a great pastel artist who
works in dry media, but his works look like oil. Today we'll be working on
a study of Clive piece and making it into watercolor & gouache. So you can see I've started
on the watercolor side, and I'm starting with my lightest colors because in
watercolor you typically work from light to dark. I'm adding very wet thin paint
onto dry paper. So this is wet-on-dry and I am doing this just with the purple and
blue shadows and I'm blending out edges where I want them with a damp brush with
just water in it. You can put on the purple very thinly because if you are
working in such a small area and you use too much water, the lines will blur and
the paint will really get out of control, so go ahead and use really thin washes
of purple, and also not too much water when you are spreading out or blending
edges. Also keep in mind that any time you want a darker purple someplace you
can just come back after the first wash is dry, and add more purple on top.
So you can see that I'm doing that right now with the flowers and with the
headband. I waited for the first wash of purple to dry and now I'm going back and
making it darker. The color scheme I'm using for this painting is quinacridone
red, quinacridone gold, and a phthalo blue, so it's going to be a very limited, triad color scheme.
With watercolor have a lot of awesome effects
and so you can see I dropped in just water onto
the crescent moon in the background, and I've gone ahead and added my green mix
into the background, and you can see how it bleeds in such a lovely way. Now
I'm going to wait for that to dry so I'm going to go over the gouache side and do
the same thing and add in the purple shadows in her little shirt and also in
the headband and stuff, so you can see I'm not really doing anything
that different at this point. When you have something that's white
like this shirt, instead of going from dark to light in gouache or from
mid-tone dark to light, you can just start with
light and go to dark the same way you do with watercolor, so it's the smartest
thing to do if the majority of your color is white and that's the case for
the shirt. I'm putting in the base dark for my headband now--it's going to be a
good reference for the light and dark values for the painting, if you have one
area that's a solid dark. Because this is gouache, you can see I've already started
touching the flowers with some white because I can use white whereas with the
watercolor I won't be able to do that. If I've lost a white, it's gone--I can only
have the white of the paper for the watercolor. On the gouache side,
I'm adding in some of the details for her shirt and as you can see I've added
in a little touch of green into the shirt for the shadows and the highlights
because that'll help give me color constancy, because the little Crescent
has green in the background--if you put a little bit of green in her shirt,
too, it helps give the paper some consistency and makes it look prettier.
Gone back over to the watercolor side, I'm darkening up her headband now, I'm
jumping back over to the gouache side and starting to do the moon in the back.
And you can see how it's different from the watercolor because instead of doing
a wet-into-wet, it's more of an impressionistic way of patching in
different colors and they don't run and have the same sort of transparent water
effects, but it does give you something very similar as long as you move your
brushstrokes in a very loose sort of "scumbling" way.
You can make the gouache very thin and also use it like watercolor, but it
doesn't really look that good. If you want to use something transparently, you
should just use the watercolor in the background. I've gone back over the
watercolor side--you can see again wet- into-wet water effects and see how the
moon on the left looks very sort of wet and loose and transparent and texturized.
The one on the right looks a little bit more stiff and definitely more
opaque, and even though I have an impressionist feel to it, it doesn't have
the sort of melty watercolor look. I'm going to do some quick wet-into-dry
work on the left watercolor side before jumping back to the right gouache side as the
watercolor dries. So on the gouache side, I'm going to do the mid-tone method for
the flowers to put down the mid-tone orangish peach first and then go ahead
and put the darker orange red on top of the flowers and then come back with the
light which is white highlights to make the flowers have that
dimension and so that's how you would work with the mid-tone method.
With gouache you can keep touching up a part
of the painting until you're happy with
it. So with this painting, once I've added the white I've decided I do want some
more shadow colors, so I'm going to go back and do some more of that. And this
is really great if you're working in gouache because you can sort of
endlessly go back and forth whereas with watercolor you can only go from light to
dark. I'm also doing the back of her head just that top part of her hair with the
mid-tone method. So far I've done the mid-tone method on the back of her hair
and the flowers, and the light-to-dark method on the very bottom for her shirt
on the gouache side, and on the watercolor side, I've just done light-to-
dark so far. Doing her hair in the back there you can see I've added in the
mid-tone, my darkest darks, and now my lightest lights.
I'm actually just going to stain the rest of her hair and
also stain her face, because I'm going to choose to do the grisaille method now
for the rest of this painting--for the rest of her hair, her face, and the bird,
so you can see as many techniques in the same painting as possible. I'm actually
going to turn the camera off for the grisaille because I've shown it in
other videos, so if you want to see how I do grisaille, then you can check out
those other videos.
Now the grisaille is there, and you can see how it's given me a very sort of useful
guide to my values for the rest of this painting. This is particularly useful if
you are doing a lot of sort of value shading even with your color because it
will give you a guide for that later on. So I'm starting to color in this bird
and I did the other bird with the camera off, but I decided to do at least one of the
birds with the camera on, so you can see what I'm doing. This gouache hummingbird
is easier to do than the watercolor hummingbird was because gouache doesn't
spread as much as watercolor does. This is because you can use gouache so much
drier than watercolor and it dries almost instantly, so it's really good for
teeny-tiny areas without making a mess. For the watercolor bird, I also
try to use really sort of dryish washes, so more dry brushing with just a little
bit of blending, because you don't want to have too much water in such a tiny
area. I'm going to shortly move on to the rest of the face because it looks like
this bird is looking good. I'm going to start with adding in
orange for her neck, and the whole process of painting with gouache is just
going to be a nice sort of experiment. You put in a color--if you don't like
it, make it warmer, make it cooler, make it lighter, make it darker--
it's totally malleable, which is why it's a very fun medium to work with.
Anything can be corrected. I can go ahead and put white over something if
I've made it too dark. I'm starting to add in the pink for the blush on her
cheeks and it looks kind of scary right now, but keep in mind that I can blend it
away into the rest of her face, and I can also add other colors to make the pink lighter
or darker. I can also add other colors just around it to make it relatively lighter
and darker, so the colors will continue to transform and change on her face as
I'm making these sort of measurements with my eye,
looking at my palette and the reference, trying to get that look. Again, you
don't have to sort of slavishly copy anything if you're an artist--you not
only want to paint something well, but you also want to do it so that it looks
more original, more creative, and perhaps more fanciful and exciting than the
original reference. Whether the original reference is a photograph or a painting,
make sure you do something creative. So, I've started putting on her
makeup; I've actually put on her lipstick and I'm going to go to the eye area and
also do her eye shadow and socket. I'm gonna give her a more golden look around
her eyebrow, so that she looks a little bit more sort of alive and sort of
romantic. Then I'm just going to continue to model the color tones on her
face, making some areas warmer, cooler darker, or lighter. I'm actually going to
still let the grisaille tonal under-painting peek through and it's going to
give me a lot of beautiful depth and make the painting look like it has
much nicer value consistency. Now that I'm done with her face, the bird looks a
little bit washed out, so I've gone and touched up the bird a little bit, and now
I'm going to finish her hair. I'm going to do the same process with the hair.
Working on it over the Grisaille. The hair that's painted with
grisaille is going to look a little bit different than the hair that was painted
with the mid-tone method, so I'm probably going to end up having to work on one or
the other to make them look more alike. The underpainting shadow
on the rest of her hair will make this hair darker and more brown looking; I
did choose to do a very dark brown almost sort of black grisaille under
painting for this. I could have chosen to do other colors, too, but I felt like this
was a good color. Especially because this is gouache, I can always cover it up and
make it a little bit lighter. If I was doing this on the watercolor side, then I
would make sure that my grisaille is not that dark because I can't really cover
it up. Back to the watercolor side: and as I said earlier, the grisaille here
is a little bit lighter than the Grisaille was on the gouache side, and I'm going to
go ahead and paint the rest of this painting on the watercolor side from
light to dark like I have painted watercolor paintings in other videos,
and also just how I painted the shirt and the purple flower earlier. So, I can't
go back and correct it and make it lighter or add white. I can do a limited
amount of lifting with a scrubber brush if I make a mistake, but I can't layer
lights and darks the way I did on the gouache. So, you can see the end result is
going to look a little bit more orange and a little bit more red than the
gouache side, and this is because the grisaille was darker on the gouache side,
and also the gouache colors that I have are actually just less orange than the
watercolor colors that I was using. So the watercolor girl looks like she's
sort of got a sunburn and whereas the gouache girl looks like she's more
keeping indoors. I could, of course, have prevented this if I used different colors
on the watercolor, so that has nothing to do with the actual watercolor itself.
Once I'm finished painting the watercolor side, take a moment to pause the video
and compare the watercolor side with the gouache side and you can see that you
can get very similar results if you're painting with watercolor and gouache.
You can work light to dark in watercolor, while you can work light to dark or
dark to light in gouache. You can do better water effects in watercolor, but
gouache is more opaque, while watercolor is more luminous, so they have different
qualities. But, you can use them to do similar work and hopefully this video
will help you understand both of these different kinds of water media painting
and also encourage you to try some projects of your own!