Watercolour & Gouache Portraits
Feb 01, 2024
Small studies painted with 90% watercolour and a little white Gouache. The white Gouache just helps for a few opaques and highlights and you can veer away from the more traditional watercolour technique of leaving your white highlights as untouched paper. Trying to get back into the flow of regular daily painting and watercolour is very easy to just pick up and dive right into. I have oil paintings on the go but it takes a little bit more cognitive load and resistance to get into that process. I sit and stew on them for much longer.
In the comment section somewhere I posted this I had an interesting micro discussion about ‘mistakes’. Someone commented that “Watercolours are tricky. One mistake and it’s start over time”. I replied that there was definitely more than one mistake going on here. I feel like mistakes are not a bad thing. We should embrace them. Of course our eyes get finely tuned to notice and amplify things after spending a long time with the work. We see the piece very differently from a first time viewer which I find quite interesting. I’m learning from the mistakes in these studies that I’m having a bit of a battle with hair recently. I get stuck in a loop of either over or under rendering. Perhaps my initial sketch needs to be more attentive to what’s going on there. ‘Mistakes’ are useful - I work on small series in succession like this to get through as many of them as fast as I can.