Hello friends!
I’ve been on a mission of improving my drawing and painting skills for the past few months. I’ve still been painting my usual stuff (witchy women with ink and Watercolor), but I’ve also been trying to draw realistic portraits with graphite.
A few days ago I decided it was time to start practicing painting with traditional gouache. I have a set of Arteza gouache, and a bunch of M. Graham tubes as well.
I decided to paint something fun, and went with a pink Oni girl, with a moonlit forest background.
I find blending and making gradients with gouache very difficult, especially when painting a person. I think the trick is to mix your colours with very subtle changes in value, so that they can lay next to each other and look like a slight plane shift. If you’re going for sharp shadows you don’t need to be as subtle.
The only problem is that with traditional gouache, lights dry darker, and darks dry lighter, so you’re never quite sure what value you’re going to get (this might be something that a lot of practice with the medium fixes).
Another issue I have is colour mixing, and matching that colour to the colour in the reference photo. I haven’t done much of this before, so it’s been very challenging. And while a finished painting may look ‘good’, it isn’t matching the reference very well.
The painting below, that I finished yesterday, is a Ghibli screenshot inspired gouache painting. I’m not showing the reference in case of copyright issues, but this is a good example of the finished painting being pretty good but not matching the reference in value, which has much warmer colours.
And so here’s where the trouble comes in… this is a work in progress
of a gouache portrait. I’m having a really hard time colour matching to the colours in the reference photo. I’m going to keep going on it (at least until the paper starts to degrade lol), and see how close I get it & I’ll report back.
Hun bun update:
She has breast cancer :( she goes for X-rays on the 16th, so we’re hoping and praying that the cancer hasn’t spread, and that she can have surgery. She’s as lively as ever right now, and in a cute space cone I bought off of Amazon. Mom’s been practicing Reiki on her and I think it’s been helping. Your thoughts and prayers are much appreciated!
In brighter news, I’ve been featured on the Art for a Spell Instagram! You can check it out here.