Art Lesson #48: Painting Water with Gouache

Even if you paint with watercolor, watch this one!

It’s Gouache Day! (but there’s also something here for watercolor painters)

Water: don’t overcomplicate it!

First, there’s a giveaway happening on Instagram if you’d like to win a few of my books. Details here.

Okay, so gouache! Several of you have asked me to do some tutorials on gouache. So far, the results of this reader survey (totally optional, but helpful, if you’d like to take it) tell me that only about 12 percent of you are interested in gouache. Nonetheless, these techniques work for watercolor as well, so we’re going to give it a go.

But wait—if you’re a watercolor painter, don’t bail out yet!

Scroll down and watch the video on white gouache. You might also like the sped-up demo at the end, because you can do basically this same technique with watercolor.

So what is gouache, exactly?

• It’s a water-soluble paint like watercolor, made with the same base (usually gum arabic) that watercolor is made from. The difference is that gouache has more pigment, and larger-sized particles of p…