Two Oranges: Gouache

Maybe all artists have certain sensibilities for different medium and for each one you have to think and act in a different way. I may have finally come to this realization to day with my two oranges gouache painting.

Normally I would try and work gouache much like my oil paints, then sometimes I would work it like watercolor, which I have no experience in, and neither would work well. Tonight I didn’t force it and just let myself figure out a process through need. I needed it to look a certain way so I tried several approaches and found what works best.

I ended up using an approach similar to Andrew Wyeth one of my most favorite artists. Wyeth, used a technique called dry-brush and he used a different medium in most of his paintings, egg tempera. Gouache is very similar to egg tempera I think, but easier to deal with. The important part is the “dry-brush”. Now your brush isn’t exactly bone dry but most of the water is squeezed out so that it feels dry. The difference is very drastic from normal water media. With a normal ratio of water to paint one could paint large swaths of color in a single stroke covering a huge area, but with a dry-brush you’re forced to work in very small hatching or stippling strokes. Detail and texture is increased but so is the time it takes to work a painting. The nice thing about this is that it’s easy to move back and forth from wet to dry, if I need to cover a large space, dip in more water and spread.

So, yeah, I’m happy with working gouache this way and I think I will continue with this method in the future.

After doing the still life I wanted to work out some ideas in gesture drawing so I followed along with Steve Huston again as he drew gestures on New Masters Academy.

Key points

• Simple yet characteristic
• Establish the long axis
• Translate the figure don’t copy
• Gesture should “ring true” to the pose
• Structure
• 2D first then 3D form next
• Don’t try to finish the whole figure, but also don’t work in details
• Medium doesn’t matter