I only brought a small watercolor kit with me to Australia, and I’ve been missing working more thickly with paint. (I miss my oils, but they are packed away in our storage unit in Philly.) So I got a few tubes of gouache paint since it doesn’t require any specific mediums and is very immediate. It’s been a long long time since I used gouache, so on Saturday I played around with a few colors to see how the paint behaves. Exciting stuff. I can use it almost as transparently as watercolor, build up quasi opaque layers, use it thickly (but not too much or it risks cracking), subsequent layers of paint can “pick up” color below (this can be a disadvantage too), and colors can run and bleed similarly to watercolor. Since I was just tooling around on a piece of paper, I wasn’t expecting to make anything in particular, and the color reflected this; it was pretty awful! On Sunday, I decided I’d try to make something of it though. Using the paint’s opaque qualities to work additively I covered up and unified some the marks. I folded and cut it into a book — why not? — and then worked on each page, sometimes moving back and forth between pages. I finished with some ink drawing as well. While the palette is a little odd for me, I think the final piece is kind of interesting, even if just as an experiment! Here it is, page by page:
