Some people have noticed that my painting of the ice skates (the feature painting on my website, business card and on my promotional material for my upcoming exhibit) looks different from my typical watercolors. Well, it is! It is painted in gouache. Gouache paint is a heavy, opaque watercolor paint that is less wet-appearing and has stronger color than traditional watercolor. You can buy gouache paint in tubes, however, I was taught in college to mix white watercolor paint to the other watercolors to produce the opaque effect. If you (accidentally) mixed your white with your watercolors you would have noticed that the paint color appeared "milky". Well, by doing that you made gouache! Painting with gouache requires a different approach than traditional watercolor. With watercolor you preserve the white of the paper, but with gouache you can actually paint with your white. For the ice skate painting I mixed a cadmium red with white to produce the background color. When that dried I drew the ice skates on the painted background. Then I proceeded to mix white with any color that I used to finish the painting. I could actually paint with the white color on the darker background to produce a nice contrast. It was a very different approach than I was used to with transparent watercolor, but I had a lot of fun with it.
