When I picked up painting again, I went straight into acrylic paint.  It was fun and forgiving and I enjoyed the medium.
Over the last couple of years, I have taken lessons in watercolour, pastels and gouache.  I love various mediums, given I do mixed media, that is a good thing!

For the last twelve months, I have been enjoying the medium of gouache. So what is gouache, I hear you ask.
Gouache is a water-based paint not dissimilar to watercolour, it is however, matte, opaque and creamy.  Being similar to watercolour, it is more opaque, which means you can layer from dark to light and correct mistakes. I love how the medium quickly dries to a matte finish, making it ideal for photographing, and scanning for prints and doesn't have that shine.  

As I have been venturing out on en plein air excursions, gouache is an ideal medium to take out and about.  It is compact enough for a small palette, dries reasonably quickly and can be activated with water.  I enjoy being able to sketch and then paint while I am out, sometimes in my sketchbook and sometimes on watercolour paper. These en plein air paintings are then reference guides for future work.  The fact I can paint in the colours of the day is ideal to capture the moment, the shadows, the highlights and the essence of the session.
   
Although you can paint larger paintings using gouache, it is often associated with smaller works from an A3 - A5 painting. Smaller work on A3 to A5 is ideal when you have limited time and space, making gouache the perfect medium. 

The artwork you see here is a small artwork on paper using gouache. This was done with an initial light translucent wash and then layered with a more creamy gouache texture to give depth to the piece. 

Have you heard of gouache or do you use it?  Leave your comments below, I would love to see your comments. 

​Featured Artwork:  The outback shed

A few years ago, I did a course on using a limited palette.  I found it to be a stretch initially using just a few colours and black and white.  
So what is a limited palette? Imagine you're baking biscuits, but you only have a few ingredients in your pantry. A limited palette in art is like that, it's when you choose to work with only a small set of colours instead of having every colour available, just like having only a few ingredients for your biscuits.
So, instead of using every colour in your art supplies kit, you might pick just three or four main colours, like red, blue, yellow, and maybe white.  I also like to have black or Payne's Grey.  With these colours, you can mix and blend them together to create all sorts of new and exciting colours.
Working with a limited palette is a fun challenge. It helps you focus on learning how colours work together and how to mix them just right to get the shades you want. Plus, it can make your artwork look really harmonious and cohesive because all the colours are related to each other, just like all the ingredients in your biscuits work together to make them taste great!
One of the main reasons I love to work with a limited palette, it makes me stretch myself with blending colours to get just what I need and want for a particular piece.
The photo of a work in progress in this post is using a limited palette of cobalt blue, Payne's grey, cadmium yellow and burnt sienna with white for adjusting tones.  Mixing colour with a limited palette is one of my favourite ways to paint.  

If you are just starting out, you can start with a few colours and mix your colours without buying every tube on the shelf!

So, think of a limited palette as your artistic recipe. You might not have every colour in the world, but with a little mixing and experimenting, you can create something really special!

​You can find some of my favourite tools here 
If you have favourite colours you use in a limited palette, why not share them in the comments below.