Gouache is like if watercolor and acrylic paint had a baby. It’s an opaque version of watercolor but dries down matte (like acrylic paint). The difference is that when you add water it’ll reactivate the gouache and you’ll be able to blend layers even when it is dried.

Types of Gouache

The differences between the gouache is the binder (what’s mixed with the pigment). Traditional gouache uses gum arabic as its binder, and can be reactivated with water. Acrylic gouache uses acrylic as its binder. Once acrylic gouache dries, it doesn’t reactive with water the way traditional gouache. Then there’s the one I used, jelly gouache. It’s just traditional gouache with a soft consistency packaged in a sauce cup. The one I used is from HIMI. It’s an inexpensive beginner-friendly option.

My experience

I worked with gouache maybe once or twice before working in this art book (canson graduate mixed media art book), so you can say that I’m fairly new to it. Gouache was one of the mediums that was sitting in my drawer that needed some love, so here is me showing some love.

I want to preface that a lot of these paintings are based on references that I found on Pinterest. I tried to experiment with different studies (lol mostly food), mostly to practice painting different subjects and see how I would capture each one. All I can say is that…. I no longer want to paint anything with strawberries..

The photo above is the first page of this art book. Because gouache is opaque I wanted to paint something with powdered sugar to see how much white can peek through. As you zoom in more closely, you can see that I really did packed the white paint on it because of dried paint texture. One of the issues I did have was over-blending, which is definitely my fault for not letting each layer full dry.