Life Drawing - How I started painting with Gouache!

Hey peeps, I have still been busy marking over the last couple of weeks so haven't had a load of time to write. Now though I have been advised to not do any more work at home, so I have now a little more free time to make stuff.

Last week I brought a new Gouache paint set made by Caran D'Ache, what is great about this set is that it is pans instead of tubes. So it makes it very easy for carrying about and doing some paints outside! This set is really great, and the colours a very high quality and have a silky smooth texture to them.

Caran D'Ache Gouache Pan Set of 15 - comes with a tube of white Gouache and a brush.:)

Set opened up, also some little mini-paintings that I was messing around with. I ADORE the matte finish that you get with Gouache, it's just the best. 

As soon as the set arrived I had to do some colour charts, so I had a little go in my large PaintOn pad!

Some quick colour swatches I worked on, I forgot to do the red to yellow blend though so I need to go back and finish that section. Thinning out the Gouache doesn't really look amazing, I think the better option is to mix with white for thinning, problem with that is the colour will loose it's vibrancy even more.

I used the set last week to do some Gouache paintings for life drawing. This time the focus of my practise was on developing colour and mixing skills, so I spent the whole session working on developing longer pieces rather than doing quick sketches.

Here is one of the pieces I worked on:

I started with a thin wash of orange (I don't know what the actual pigment is for these colours, I couldn't find any information on it and I'm not an experienced enough painter to guess.) Anyways, this wash acted as a good base to paint onto, as when I start putting cooler shades of colour in, some of the warm background tones should peek through a little. 

I kept my palette fairly simple: I only used an orange, a pinkish-red colour, a bit of yellow and a white, which I added more of as I continued the painting, making more opaque layers. This meant that I could focus on seeing what I could get from just those colours, this also helped keep the painting from going muddy too. 

Also limiting the palette helped my distinguish the colours better for my colourblindness, if I had too much going on, then I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between all the blues and purples and browns and dark greens. :S

One thing I need to sort out if I do more of these kinds of paintings is to get more white Gouache, the set I have comes with a little tube but mine seems to be running out really quick. I'm going to have to stock up on that a lot in order to get anywhere with doing a load of these paintings.

More life drawing this Thursday, I will be doing more paintings so I will upload those when they are done. :)

-James