On gouache

It's been a very long while, but I have decided to give the old blog a go again, even though I am not entirely sure that many people even read blogs any more. I guess I am about to find out!😅

To get the ball rolling, I thought I would revisit some thoughts on gouache. While I love my oils, sometimes I feel like the preparation, heft, and cleanup of carting out my oil painting gear can actually be a deterrent to regular plein air practice. I started playing with gouache some time ago as a way to develop a simpler, more lightweight plein air painting kit that is easier to set up and clean up.

Gouache is basically an opaque watercolor, that can be applied using a direct painting approach similar to the way I paint in oils (dark to light, "thin" to "thick", etc.) It can be applied in thin washes or opaque strokes, though it really doesn't allow for heavy impasto techniques due to its tendency to crack or chip at very thick consistencies. Even so, it has a lovely velvety appearance that, unless varnished, can be reactivated with water for additional painting or adjustments. It is easy to clean up afterwards and lends itself to small formats for studies and low-stress experimentation.

One thing that I have had to adjust to is that there is a color shift as the paints dry that requires a certain amount of regular practice to be able to intutively anticipate. Specifically, light colors appear darker as they dry and dark colors tend to dry a bit duller and lighter.

The other big adjustment is the rapid dry time, which is both an advantage and a handicap for a painter used to the long open times with oil paints. Regular application of water using a spray bottle to re-wet the palette while working helps with this, but it can still be a struggle for me when painting outside in the open air, especially at locations like the beach, where the rapid dry time is intensified by the heat and ocean breeze. As with any skill, practice is key.

Here is a little video my teen daughter put together for me of me finishing up a gouache still life, painted from the convenience of my back porch. I hope to do some longer videos in the future, especially if I can wrangle the kid's help again.

Adding some highlights, “Begonia on the Sill,” Gouache on Illustration board, 6x6”

Lake Como Painting Progression (continued)

Well the time has really gotten away from me this week, as we are in the home stretch of my daughter’s “learn from home” work for her last weeks of fourth grade. But I HAVE been making progress on my painting of Varenna, the start of which I shared in my prior post.

First things first… I thought before going any further I would share a little about the colors currently on my palette, and what I’ve been using to work on this piece.

I will start by saying that this is a pretty big palette of colors for me, and definitely larger than what I use for my field work. But because I have such limited studio time, it helps to have a few more “convenience colors” to work with so I don’t spend so much time mixing. Plus look at those yummy colors. Sometimes it is just plain fun to indulge in them, as long as I don’t have to carry them around in my backpack! The paints listed with an asterisk* by their name are the kinds of colors I nearly always use. This is basically a double primary palette with the addition of an earth (brown pink) and a “black” (Payne’s Gray, which is really almost a dark blue).

I pretty much always lay my basic palette out the same way in a clockwise fashion. So for instance, starting with my earth colors in the lower left, I move up to white, which is always in my upper left, followed by colors from warm to cool, generally speaking. This palette has varied over time with a few colors added, or removed, or others substituted from time to time when I want to experiment. For instance, my two reds used to be Cadmium Red Light and Alizarin Crimson, but I switched to a cooler Napthol Red for my “warm” because when tinted it makes a cleaner, less orangey pink. I will use Quniacridone Violet in a similar manner to my former Alizarin Crimson for nice dark purples or browns, to modify other colors.

If you are new to painting I would recommend starting out with a double primary palette (a warm and cool of each primary color, yellow, red, and blue) plus white, and then slowly adding new colors over time as you get a good handle of what your primaries can mix. You might be surprised at what even a single primary palette can do.

Okay, enough palette talk for now. Let’s recap;

It’s time to address the rest of that white canvas by adding color to the lit side of the trees

I also start addressing a few of the details of the foreground including boats and walkway to the town of Varenna.

And finally (with a big caveat that this color is off because I was working on the painting at night and photographed it without the benefit of daylight) I start to address the masts, water, and clouds.

At this point I am going to sit with the painting for a day or two and may “tweak” it here and there, but I am close. I will post the finished piece, (photographed in better lighting) when I do. ***UPDATE*** See the final painting here.

Lake Como painting progression

I am working on putting together a video post, but I have to get my 9 year old to help me with some of the technical side first.😅 So today I am relying on the good old fashioned blog post, sharing a step-by-step painting in progress.

I had such a good time with my last Lake Como Painting that thought I’d “laissez les bons temps roule,” (as the Cajun in me likes to say.) I chose a scene in Varenna from my photo archives, one of my favorite memories that now feels like both yesterday and a long time ago. I chose one of my favorite canvas sizes, a 24x30”, and a color scheme of jewel tones that always cheers me up.

My starting approach for the last year or so is to just very casually sketch out my composition lightly in sienna oil pastel. The Sennlier oil pastel is so soft and lovely that it erases my change of mind with a very low stain, and yet allows me to indicate some shading at the same time.

Once I am more or less satisfied with my composition, I begin laying in some of the shadow areas of my painting, to get a feeling for the overall value pattern of my painting.

I am generally trying to keep things very broad as I lay down the initial color. While not all of the water is “in shadow”, I decided to lay in the general color because I felt it would help me make a decision about the composition ( as you will see in the next photo.)

My initial idea was to include the foreground shoreline with a couple of rowboats, but at the same time I wanted to keep the distant horizon below the middle point, which pushed the shoreline down. After laying in the water I decided the shoreline wasn’t really doing much for me or the composition.

This is better, I think. Even working from photos in the studio, there is still a lot of decision making that goes into the process. You don’t have to be a slave to a photo and paint something in, just because it’s there in the reference. This is my painting, after all, and sometimes the best thing I can do for my work is to simplify. There may be a future painting with the shoreline boats as the feature, you never know, but sometimes it’s better to say one thing with clarity than several things with confusion.

At this point it was time to step away and make dinner, but I felt like I was at a good stopping point so this is where I left off last evening. I will still need to address the rest of that white canvas and make additional adjustments to the water and boats , but now I have a pretty solid idea of where I’m going next.

Plein air in the garden

As I mentioned in my last post, I participated last week in a “call for artists” from Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens to celebrate National Public Gardens week. You may know from reading previous blogs that I have painted in these gardens many times as a resident of Central Virginia. But somehow, painting in this context, constructed around an “official event,” helped me to see this place with new eyes and renewed excitement.

I decided to challenge myself by painting some gardens that I hadn’t tackled before. The first day I went it was AWASH with tours and school groups. There were so many kids there stopping to give their input. All of it was actually very positive, but also a bit distracting. Now, I love kids quite a lot, (and even have one those cuties myself) but on this day they were messing with my mojo and I had a hard time concentrating on what I was doing😅.

The architectural elements were minimal, but even so, required some concentrated drawing, some sense of proportion and placement to get right, especially since I was fairly close up to my subject and didn’t have a lot of room to manuver. I moved my entire setup several times and wiped it all down, before finally settling on a view that satisfied. It left me less time than I had planned to get everything down before I had to head back to my house in Ashland, but I did a pretty decent job, with only the need for a few final touches in the studio.

“Illuminated Courtyard, Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens”, Oil on linen, 12x16” ©Jennifer E Young

When I was (finally) in a pretty good place with my painting, a kid came by to examine my progress. I estimate he was around my daughter’s age (3rd or 4th grade) . He studied my effort with seriousness, alternately looking at my painting and the scene, my painting and the scene. Finally he gave me a decisive and approving nod. “You’ve done your homework,” he said.

And that, my friends, is the beauty of painting outdoors. It’s filled with its share of frustrations to be sure, but the moments of spontaneity are pure gold.

Escape to Provence! A Step by Step Demo

Over Christmas break as everything was pretty brown and exceedingly soggy outside, I decided to mine my many photos of sunnier times from my trips abroad. I will never forget my trip to Lourmarin, painting and eating my way through this beautiful part of Provence. I still long to go back, and am determined to do so, hopefully this time sharing it’s magic with my daughter. In the meantime I can always revisit the experience through paintings. So let’s get started, shall we?

The Design

I draw out my design in a number of ways, usually with a warm tone like burnt sienna. I had been doing this with paint, but I’m enjoying these little oil sticks by Sennelier that I bought on a whim. I like them because they are quicker and can be thinned in the same manner as the paint for washes or adjustments. I also like them because they don’t seem to stain as much as the paint, which means after adjustments and corrections, the drawing and toning are easier to read.

The Shadows

Next I want to lay in the shadows, as this will give my painting the structure it needs. Most of the shadows are concentrated around the horizon where the building, (the area of interest) is.

Color all around

Here I am starting to flesh out the color in the fields and mountains, still leaving my lightest lights untouched.

Painting the sky

To work out the sky, I paint a blue sky color around the areas where I think the clouds are going to go, trying to keep the edges soft and feathery. Right now the white of the clouds is just the white of the canvas.

Head in the Clouds

As I decide on the cloud placement, I start to add pigment. This is a sunny breezy mid day scene so the clouds are pretty bright and high. Keeping the value light, I mix a tiny dab of Gamblin Cadmium Orange deep with a much larger ratio of Titanium White for the lighter side. The shadow areas are made up of Ultramarine Blue, Napthol Red, Titanium White, and maybe a teensy dab of Cadmium Orange. Working wet-into-wet allows me to tease out soft edges. Here I also lay in the color of the light side of my building and the dirt road. The building and the road leading to it have the greatest contrast to lead the eye.

Poppies!

I keep the poppies and other wildflowers to the last, laying them on pretty thick. I used to use Cadmium Red light for the poppy color but I have since replaced this on my palette with Napthol Red. It is a highly staining, cooler red than the Cadmium but can acheive cleaner pinks when desired so I find it both less expensive and more versatile. I mix the Napthol with Cadmium Orange to get that distinctive, sunny “poppy color” I’m after.

“Le Printemps, Temple de Lourmarin”, Oil on linen, 24x30” ©Jennifer E Young

Above is the completed work, photographed outside for correct color and no glare! This Protestant Church, Le Temple de Lourmarin, is simple and austere on the inside but it has a wonderful exterior and adds a sense of history and tradition as it sits like a sentry at the edge of town. Click through on the final image to read more or purchase this piece.