hello and welcome to chief joe's art stuff my name is julie and i'm here to impart some knowledge to
you today via a two-minute art tip and today's tip is basically about the differences between
gouache and watercolor a lot of people kind of get a little intimidated and scared off by gouache and
a lot of people don't even know really know what it is so i'm here to clarify and show you some
really really cool features and differences um between gouache and watercolor as you may know
gouache and watercolor share the similarity of that they're basically a combination of pigments
and gum arabic as the binder so the gum arabic is what allows you to pick up the color
and allows it to adhere to the surface that you're applying it to so that's where the
similarities are but the differences are that gouache is formulated with a series of pigments
that are opaque versus watercolor that are transparent now why would you want that well
gouache has some really unique characteristics that are wonderful in certain scenarios
for instance for a long time gouache has been known as basically like a designer's material
because the opacity and the thickness of gouache allows you to lay color onto itself with great
coverage no lap lines no trouble like blending you know you get a thick rich punch of color
it dries flat it's easy to photograph so in the days before computer generated like illustrations
and logos or even if you're doing uh illustration that's hand done gouache is a really fantastic
tool to get like really strong immediate color and like guaranteed coverage now some people
find that a little intimidating however i think that it's fascinating and a wonderful way to a
wonderful accompanying accompaniment to your existing watercolor lineup they can be used
back and forth and gouache does have some characteristics that are similar to watercolor
like a lot of people think that like once gouache has dried that it's like cement and
you'll never get it back up again i'm here to show you that that's absolutely not the case
so i've got a few little cool things to show you here actually i did like a little pre-set up
of a gouache versus a watercolor on the exact same surface so what i did here was
this is just a coloring book page from pepin press that i removed from the book and pepin press
is wonderful because this is actual watercolor paper which is conducive to what we're doing here
but in order to keep all things equal and you can see as easily as possible what we're trying to do
so this half of this page is actually executed with all winsor newton gouache
we have colors like indigo and cypress green and then linden green here and also some lemon yellow
and permanent rose the interesting thing about gouache is there aren't necessarily
all the time direct you know conversions to watercolor because you are dealing with
some different pigments in gouache because they're opaque versus the transparent pigments that are in
watercolor so some of our colors are different here on our watercolor one but we do have like
indigo and we have permanent rose and lemon yellow and stuff like that but not all of
them are exactly the same but what we did is to kind of show you like what these colors look like
like the power punch that they have directly out of the tube and like their full strength versus
actually taking them down into like a 50 wash like some people think that that's the only way
that gouache can be used as like full strength out of the tube like super thick and blah blah blah
super thick doesn't really really work because like you can't do like an impasto application
with gouache because it uh the binder won't hold and you know to be that thick you actually will
get some cracking so you have to have a wet brush in order to get it to move around a little bit
but what we did was like full strength here and then like a watercolor style wash with it here
and you can see that you get a whole lot of variation in these colors uh and a whole lot
of interesting variety that you can do now over here on the watercolor side we have a whole bunch
of colors that we were able to duplicate so indigo and permanent rose and sour lemon and those kinds
of things were direct correlations that we could use in watercolor some of them were not but again
what we did was like pretty much directly out of the tube just a little wet brush and applied them
on here and then like a watercolor wash so you can see the two of them together so you can see
that you can get all kinds of dynamic variety with those two and see how well those kinds of things
work together another one of the things that kind of like weirds people out about gouache is
that it can people sometimes think that you can't blend it and that you can't rework it once it's
dry so i've actually applied a little bit of this cypress green which i really like it's so pretty
and i've got it on the surface and i've just got a wet brush here and i'm actually going to take
this this is already dried um put it on there a while ago and i'm going to show you how easy
it is to pick it up this is it with a scrubber this is just with a synthetic sable brush and
you can see how we can reactivate color and move it around just like you would with watercolor okay
and see how pretty that is we can soften it we can do all kinds of different stuff
now one thing i can tell you is a lot of the colors um that are formulated in gouache lines
generally the pigments aren't as conducive to completely lifting color up it can be a little
bit of a problem so um you're not going to get generally back to the white white white of the
page but um you can reactivate them and move them around pretty easily then we've got a little bit
indigo here and we're just going to wet this i'm going to show you how powerful the coverage is
with gouache one color over the next so we're going to go directly over this
color you can see that there's absolute like complete coverage
you're not getting any bleed through of the cypress green underneath there
and we can play around and push the limits of this dark dark indigo over the cypress and
you get really really nice dynamic coverage and when this dries it'll be completely flat
and you won't have to worry about them bleeding into each other that's one of the really fantastic
wonderful things about gouache that makes it kind of different from watercolor with watercolor
depending on the color you would have you know a little bit of show through and a little bit of
the colors working with each other which is one of the the delicate balances and fascinating parts
of watercolor but gouache also has this amazing capability where it functions a little bit like
acrylic wood where you you know put a color on top of the other it masks out the thing below
so for illustrators graphic designers textile designers landscape architects sometimes when
they're doing renderings will really really enjoy the way that this works versus just watercolor
so if you haven't taken a look at gouache it is just the happy little cousin of watercolor
check them out they are fascinating they are fun they're just a whole amazing set
of characteristics if you haven't tried them and we're sure that you will enjoy you
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