Week 3: Gouache Breakthrough and Color Strategies

After 4 months of painting with gouache, instead of oil, it finally happened — gouache and I bonded for life! This week I found the key for me —TEXTURE; the painting above shows the technique: layering analogous colors with expressive strokes to create interesting textures. Experimenting with underpaintings also added to the fun. For the painting above,  I tried two different underpaintings: warm and cool.

My painting adventure has two tracks -- hours and hours to paint on my own and academic study at Gage Academy. This week’s “school” topic focused on developing an intentional color strategy. Imagine you are going to start a painting, instead of diving in and painting, you explore palette options (e.g., neutral, cool dominate, complementary). For you artists out there, here’s an exercise worth doing. Start with a simple composition, a few major shapes, and then paint it in various color palettes. Here's my exercise. I would probably never paint with pastel colors, but it was fun to experiment. 

Or if there's an artist whose color palette you adore, try applying it to your composition. The Diebenkorn Matisse show at SFMOMA was based on this exact idea. Diebenkorn spent years studying and using Matisse’s color palettes in highly original paintings. Here’s an example, Matisse on the left, Diebenkorn using Matisse's palette on the right.