Methods of gouache painting! So I've got three leaves here today
and I'm going to show you how you can paint them using either the mid-tone, the
tiling, or the grisaille method, all with gouache. So let's start with the mid-tone
and basically this means that you put down the middle tone, so you can divide
it up and do at least three tones, the light, the dark, and the middle, which is
in this case this yellowish brown, so this sort of earthy yellow. And I'm
putting it down as that is what looks like to me the middle tone of my leaf. So
there are darker colors in the leaf and lighter colors in the leaf, but this is
the middle value that I can find. There can be several areas of different
mid-tones. In this case because this is a very simple shape, just a single leaf
there is only one area with one mid-tone. So now I started adding what looks like
to me the darkest value in my leaf. Because once you have your mid-tone over
the entire area, you can then go back in and add your darks and then your lights.
So here I am now adding the dark in this case it's this earthy red orange. You
can see I'm adding my dark color or value in a fairly thin layer and I did
the same thing with my mid-tone. So there's no need to start spackling on
the paint, because with gouache it's the same thing as it is with watercolor or
oil or lots of other different mediums. You don't want to start really really
thick. You actually want to start semi thin and get a little bit thicker so you
have an easier time blending. If you have thicker paint dry brushed on,
that should be on the top layer. And now that I've added my darkest dark over my
mid-tone and I'm going to add my lightest light which in this case is the
gouache mixed into the yellow mid-tone color to make it a very very light
yellow. It looks almost white on screen, and I'm just adding it wherever I see
highlights in my reference photo which is just a leaf I found on Wikipedia. It's
a photograph of a leaf. I can be selective about what looks artistically
pleasing to me and I can leave some of them out if I want because of course
that's what art is for, and I'm choosing not to blend the edges of this but if I
wanted to I could blend the edges of the highlights because gouache is re soluble.
In the tiling example it's different than laying down mid-tone, darkest dark,
and highlight. I'm actually laying down separate little tile or
mosaic pieces. They look like little puzzle pieces of the different colors
that I see so on my palette. I have different tones with the yellow and the
orange and the white mixed into the yellow and the orange, and I'm sitting
here and adding these different tiles in. I'm only using three tones
just like I did with the mid-tone method. I can actually see more colors in the leaf,
shadow colors and such, so if I wanted to I could use more, but for the
purposes of this simple demo I'm only going to do three so it's clear.
Sometimes you'll use tiling, sometimes you'll use the mid-tone technique,
because it depends on the painting and what suits the painting and what's
easiest for the painting. If it helps you to make a thin stained color
underneath all of your tiles to help you guide what kind of tiles are going to be
above it, then go ahead and do that. I haven't chosen to do that for this
demonstration because it's a very simple leaf and I can see the three colors that
I'm going to be using. You can also layer tiles--so once you are done
tiling the first underneath layer, you can do what I'm doing on top which is now take
the highlights and use them in a separate tile layer, because I found that
to be easier than including them in the bottom tile layer. And you can do a few
layers of tiles with gouache and it will be okay with it. The only thing you have
to watch out for is not getting muddy colors using too much water.
If you are adding a very light color over a dark color then
try removing some of the dark before you add the light color on top. You can also
blend edges like I have for some of these edges. And you can leave some of
them sharp, it's totally up to you. For any of these methods using gouache,
it can blend when the edges are wet or when they're dry, that's the great thing
about gouache is you can do that. And you can't do that for oil or acrylic and
watercolor is semi resoluble on paper, but it does stain more so if you want to get a
seamless blend you'll have to use gouache if you have already let the
paint dry. I'm going to now move on to my favorite of these three methods and
that's the grisaille method, and basically it involves using a value
under painting or a tonal map underneath your painting before you proceed with
the colors. You can do this value under painting in black. You can also do it in
green or sepia or a shadow mix of your colors. In this case I have an analogous
color scheme and I have not used any complementary colors. I'm just going to
go with using black and thin down black to make my darkest darks and my mid-tone
and leave my lightest areas white with the white of the paper and so you can
see that this is actually very effective because what it does is it builds in
your assertive shadow tones automatically. It'll give your painting
more depth. Just like a strong drawing will make your painting stronger, this
strong value under painting will make the rest of your color painting stronger.
So this is a method that was used by a lot of old masters and it's still used
by some painters today like Alex Ross and also botanical painters like Susan
harrison Tustain, even though neither of them have called it grisaille, that's
exactly what they're doing. Depending on the color you choose for
your value under painting the colors on top will look very different, so in this
case I'm choosing this black and it's gonna make my whole leaf look darker
than my other two leaves. If I had decided to go with a brown or a darker
orange or a blue which is the opposite of orange on the color wheel, it would
have looked very different, so you can see that this leaf is going to look
darker than the other ones. The reason this leaf looks darker and like
it has more shadows is because those other ones actually just don't have the
black as a shadow anywhere. If I did use shadow colors for the mid-tone or the
tiling then I could have achieved similar effects as I am with the
grisaille painting of the leaf it just would have been a little bit harder. So
once your grisaille under painting has dried, which it does rather quickly
because this is gouache you can go ahead and start adding your colors as you did
with your leaves for the other methods. In this case, however, you do have a more
clear guide as to where you're going to have darker and lighter and also the
colors will look different because you'll have this other color underneath
it affecting the shadows. You can go ahead and make the colors so thick that
the shadow doesn't show up in areas where you don't want it. I have seen some
people do that especially for oil painting, but I do think that's really
counterproductive. If you are going to incorporate a shadow layer and it is a
dark color then try to make it harmonize with your top layers so that when it
peeks through it is adding to the entire look of the painting. And also if you
hide it completely, then it's not really much of a guide and you might as well
not have done the value under painting in the first place. Then you're probably
just better off using the mid-tone method or the tiling method because
grisaille is harder. You spend more time doing more
so if you're not going to make use of it in a proper way then you can leave it
out for simpler paintings. I'll just use a tiling method and sometimes the
midtone method so you have to base it off of whatever kind of painting you're
doing. Don't do the grisaille for something that's super simple, it would
be a waste of time for a different reason. So you can see I've added on my
yellow and also my orange on top of the tonal under painting and you can see
that they look different from the two mid-tone and tiling leaves up there. I've
also used grisaille with watercolor and the difference between using it with
watercolor and gouache is that of course if I did it with watercolor and I had
the grisaille or some other dark area I couldn't really fix it I can only do a
limited amount of lifting of the paint with the gouache it's different. If I
don't like some of the darker areas that are happening because of the grisaille
or of anything else I can just top it off with a lighter color and because
gouache is opaque I can fix any part of the painting. So you can see I'm now
adding my white highlights as I've mentioned before it's light yellow mixed
into the white gouache and I'm adding it where I want to strike highlights on the
veins or other parts of the leaf and once I'm done with that after some edge
blending I'll be pretty much set and as usual whenever you are doing any
blending make sure you use a damp brush, almost dry. Don't use a soaking brush,
it's not going to work for blending edges in gouache or in watercolor for
that matter. So this has been a small demo of the mid-tone, tiling, and
grisaille painting techniques in gouache. Depending on the nature of your
drawing and the painting, you can use different techniques for different
paintings so use whatever suits a particular painting and drawing best. I
have done other demos which compare a watercolour painting with a
gouache painting of the exact same illustration so hopefully that will also
prove useful in your gouache education. So have fun painting in gouache and I
hope my video has been helpful to you!