Monthly Archives: May 2014

foxhole point

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Foxhole Point at the far end of Millook Haven in Cornwall, painted in gouache from a photo.

The colours of the sandstones, shales and slates (I looked it up) in the spectacular geology of Millook Haven are a beautiful mix of purples oranges browns blues and greys. I did attempt some on-location sketches of the rocks, but I envisioned a translucent multilayered watercolour to do it justice. This isn’t it, but I had fun with the gouache.

Compared to acrylics there seems to be much more of a colour shift as the gouache dries. It’s most noticeable at the extremes: the rich deep dark colours of wet paint can dry with a slight matt sheen and lose some of their vibrancy, and whites tend to fade considerably unless applied thickly. The wetness and consistency of the paint together with how well the brush is loaded affect the covering power and final result.

imitation in gouache

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I love James Gurney’s sketchbook portraits, often done rapidly with the subject in front of him. This was an attempt to imitate his style using gouache to paint from a paused video. I took heart from watching how he builds up detail from seemingly formless swirls of loosely applied colour using opaque gouache. He also uses casein, but I’m not sure if that’s available outside the US.

I found the gouache dries to a slightly lighter colour, and fresh layers can reactivate the paint below if they are too wet and worked for too long. As always, it’s hard to know when to stop: there’s always more detail to add or corrections to be made. Sometimes it’s useful to keep on painting, just to see what will happen. Other times it seems best to stop early and use later paintings for further experiments.

black and phthalo blue

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Copied from a photo and from life using oils on paper, this painting took a beating as I tried to get it in to shape.

The first problem was finding the right mix of paints to match the intense, saturated mid-green colour of the transmitted light passing through the mint leaves (yes, they’re mint leaves). I had ultramarine blue and azo yellow but really needed something like phthalo blue to get that high chroma acid green which could be adjusted with yellow and titanium white.

I ended up buying a tube of Winsor Blue which had the colour labelled as PB15:3. Only later did I realise that I’d bought Winsor Blue Red Shade when I really needed Green Shade (PB15). Also, the tube was regular oil paint, not the water-miscible oil I was using. I was hoping (after reading online forums) that I could clean up the brushes with just soap and water, after all it is just oil. It does clean up but needs a lot more working in to the bristles of a lot more detergent than is needed for the Holbein Duo Aqua oils, and phthalo blue being an intense staining colour doesn’t help.

Anyway, all that palaver resulted in the rather insipid green on the right-hand leaves.

The backdrop was a black shirt hung up behind the vase which was sitting on some white kitchen roll. (I thought a white surface would be an improvement on the imitation wood formica table top — am I ruining the mood?)

I managed to mix up the background black a little too well, and the first draft looked dead and flat. Closer inspection of the flowers showed they had more depth and variety of values than I had initially painted, so I decided to try glazing on some darker values to create more contrast.

Instead of burnt umber I used a mix of more translucent paints for the glaze, hoping I could build up tones while letting the colours beneath shine through. In my haste the glaze mixed in with the titanium white of the table top which I hadn’t allowed to dry. The resultant murky mess was nothing like the subtle glazes found in the paintings of the old masters, instead it looked as if I’d spilt something.

I used more kitchen towel to scrub off the ‘glaze’ and tried a few more times, with similar results.

Eventually I got to that point where I knew the painting was lost. So I patched up the table top and shadows as best I could and drew a line under the whole exercise. The murky grey brown lighting doesn’t complement the inaccurate greens. The lighting is flat, the arrangement of flowers too literal (what’s going on above the carnations?). Composition, colour, value, lighting — there’s a lot to learn. At least now I know some of the ways not to do it.