Hey youtubers, it's Hajra! So here's the part 2 of the latest watercolour vs
gouache demo on my channel. You might recall that in part one I compared
watercolor with transparent luminous multifaceted gems, and gouache with
opaque and evenly lit, colored stones. Then I walked you through a limited
color scheme and color wheel construction and did the watercolor side
of the demo. I'd like to mention that because this painting sat around for
some time, I did softened some harder edges on the watercolor side with some
scrubber brushes when the camera was off. These are basically harder nylon brushes
in a filbert brush head and you can dampen them and use them to soften any
hard edges on a dry painted area. I did this for some of the hair edges, some of
the dress edges and even for some small edges on the butterfly. It gives a nice
mix of hard and soft edges and places for the eye to move and rest and lets
the background melt a little bit into the foreground. Now it's time to complete
the gouache or opaque watercolor side. Let's start easy peasy by painting in
the butterfly a solid yellow as that's what he mostly is. Now I'll go down to
the infamous, tacky yearbook dress and start putting down swatches or tiles of
color. The dress is going to be loose and impressionistic like on the watercolor
side, so details are not important, just a lot of various colored blobs. Blend, then
lighten with white. Add darker purple tiles for shadow areas, brighten yellow
and orange, then more blending, more whitening and more sprucing up colors
until you like what you see. The paint should be semi opaque to opaque and not
super thin and wet or too dry. If it lays down with a pasty texture dry brush
effect it's too dry. If it's transparent and runny, then it's too watery.
Don't worry, try it a few times and you'll get the hang of it. So I did a
basic tiling method with the dress, and now I'm gonna stain the skin and hair
yellow to warm up the paper from the cold stark white. I'm gonna turn the
camera off and do a grisaille or tonal or value layer in just purple. You've
seen me do this in past videos as a value under painting for watercolor or
for gouache. Remember, I did the watercolor side of this demo
blow-by-blow in the first part of this video for the hands and face. When I turn
the camera off to do the grisaille for the gouache side, I did the same face and
hand all over again, but this time just in purple which is a shadow color,
instead of all the colors on my palette. Now when I move on, I can lay down local
skin color with the grisaille layer as a guide. When I did the grisaille I thought
of value: light to dark. Now I can focus mostly on color and temperature, yellow
or peach or tan or Rose, warm or cool. Because gouache is opaque, I can
even cover and lighten areas of the under painting where it looks too dark to me.
As with the watercolor side, I've chosen a more fantastical and emotive limited
color scheme than the original reference for this study. The result is that the
lighting looks more golden and the skin tones are more diverse than they are in
the original reference, so it's not an even peachy shade, it's like lots of
other different colors. I like this which is why I did it, but
you can do whatever you want for your study. Continue to mold the face and neck and
features with the gouache colors over the grisaille as a guide. Go darker and
bolder with your colors in dark value areas, and lighter and milder in lighter
value areas. As with the watercolor side, used a damp, almost dry, clean brush
to blend edges for wherever a soft blended look is needed. Gouache will
automatically dry with a hard edge like watercolor unless you soften it. This is
the opposite of painting in oil paint where soft edges are easy, as I've heard
artists like Jeff watts mention and hard edges are the ones you have to
consciously create in oil. Now please pardon this grainy footage that's gonna
show up just for a bit right now. I didn't know that zooming in in
post-production would do this. Next time we'll stick to live shot zooms.
Anyway ,you can see how I render the lips and eyelid with the local colors over
the grisaille, and again it's a guide. It provides the value in shape and I add
the local color and color intensity and temperature. Back to normal footage, and
spruce up the yellow in the barette and the earring, then onto the hair. For the
watercolor side, I went from light to dark saving the white of the paper for
the highlights. For the gouache side, I can use the mid-tone method for the hair,
lay down the mass or mid-tone color which is in this case a purpley black. Now I
can add highlights back in with white and yellow tints. This will be wet on dry
like most of the work that I've done on the gouache side. The gouache side looks
cooler, bluer, and grayer than the watercolor side even though we started
with similar temperature colors on both sides. Why? Well, because we used only the
white of the paper on the watercolor side there is no cooling effect. On the
gouache side, however, we have titanium or zinc white to create tints and
highlights, and because titanium and zinc white are both a blueish, cool
temperature ,everywhere they're added the colors get grayer and colder.
Thus, the gouache version of a painting will be cooler and grayer than a
watercolor version of the same study. As with the watercolor side, keep the hair
loose and impressionistic, it's a great look for studies, and also for a lot of
finished paintings as well. And that's a wrap!
Remember, this is just an instructional demo from a reference, if this had been
an original piece or a masters study I wanted to sell, I could take both sides
further. I could keep tweaking color and form until it was more finished. You can
feel free to tighten up and render more than I did
or go loose and more unfinished than I did. Either way, I hope you've
learned a bit more about watercolor and gouache painting in this demo. I've got
some exciting videos coming up from quick art card and watercolor Marker
reviews to detailed watercolor and gouache journal pieces from all over the
San Francisco Bay Area. See you soon and happy painting!