Art Lesson #22: Watercolor vs Gouache
A comparison of popular sketchbook paints
Your requests: a watercolor vs. gouache comparison
I learned how to paint in oils, which are about as opposite to watercolor as any paint could be. I always thought watercolor was too fiddly and technical for my personality. I also thought you couldn’t get deep, rich, saturated colors with watercolor, based on the kind of—well, watery—paintings I’d seen.
That was all wrong, of course. Once I needed a more portable paint to travel with and use in a sketchbook, I found out that watercolors suited me just fine.
Then I discovered gouache, and its cousin, acryla gouache, which gave me back some of the qualities I’d missed from oil paint. This let me into acrylics, which I’m just starting to use now when I want to make a larger painting, like this 16x20, which I worked up from the two sketchbook-size paintings above:
Yes, if you’re wondering, I have too much paint! And too many mediums! But I do use them in different ways:
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