Poise

Illustration, 2009.04.02

In continuation of my ongoing quest to try to understand gouache, I painted up this guy for this week’s Illustration Friday.

I think that most of the trouble that I was having with gouache is that I treated it too much like watercolor, when in reality it’s quite a different animal. For one thing, although you can make transparent washes with gouache, the medium truly shines when you really pile it on. Before this painting I was very reserved with my gouache usage because it comes in tiny, expensive tubes. You can still see my timidity (and stinginess) with gouache in parts of the background.

The second big issue I was having with gouache (and to some extent, the rest of my paintings) was that the images were coming out much too color-chaotic. As an exercise, I tried to keep this painting almost completely monochromatic by simply using several values and chroma of green. The red was used as a complimentary color and I mixed some greens into it in order to dial down the chroma in the shadow areas.

I’m very happy with the color in this piece and I owe much of its success to James Gurney and his excellent blog posts (especially the series he did on color wheel masking). If you haven’t visited his blog before, you’re in for a treat: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com.