Art Journal Entry 1 (Gouache)

Blogs are kind of a dead medium, but I write so much on my instagram stories, only for them to turn to dust on the wind, I figure a bit more text space to parse out the thoughts and make them re-accessable couldn't hurt. For now, here's a few pages from my most recent sketch books;

I've been playing around with gouache for the past few months, and it's my first real experience trying to consistantly improve at a physical paint medium. I was playing with water colours before that and was having a lot of fun with those but was just really missing access to opaque blending. Learning that Gouache can be 're-activated' on the pallette with water also got me excited from a material waste perspective (i always hated how much acrylic paint i didn't ultimately use and once that's dried, you're done for buddy).

I have the idea in my head at the moment that I would like to be able to do rapid portraits for people in a market setting, which I think is definately achievable with water colour as a can draw quite quickly and water colours are kind of just 'chuck it on' and it almost always looks good.

But as fun as the watercolours are, i'll always be chasing that painterly john singer-sargent-esque style in any medium. This is a much longer process, and requires some more actual painting skills though I'm finding that coloured pencils are a great way to save a struggling gouache painting.

The first few things i'm learning that are making the biggest difference are the craft/ process elements. i.e. how to use a pallette properly, having two cups of water so that you're brushes don't get as muddy (which tracks greys all across said pallette and the artwork), and realising how handy sponges are for cleaning a brush between colours. 

When I was learning to paint digitally, I was very frustrated with using a pen display at first so i've been here before. Learning the details of your tool is tedious but pays off so well. With the tablet it was shortcuts, with this it's colour ratios, it's always something.

The breakthrough with digital (and with drawing too really) was I think just doing a heap of portraits alongside specific feature studies (i.e. a few pages/ focused sessions on eyes, ears, mouths etc on their own) so this is what i'll do here again. 

Eyes are a pretty big deal, so maybe that'll be what I do first.