More White Gouache

Having finished my stint of work, it is with great joy that I am able to get out into the garden again and also get out my paint brush and have some time in the studio. Eager to try some more of this acrylic gouache work, I selected a picture I took last year of some fairly straight forward white roses. They do not have too many petals and open to show lovely brown and gold stamens which are a lovely contrast to the white.
I made a fairly careful drawing of two of the blooms, on my usual Fabriano Extra White.

The next step was to cover the paper in a wash of a variety of colours that I wanted in the background. I kept it fairly light at this stage, as some of the background areas would need to be fairly light, and any dark areas could be added later. I knew that by covering the pencil lines with paint, I would not be able to readily erase them, but this did not overly concern me as the gouache would obliterate them as I painted each petal. When the background was completely dry, I started the exciting bit of painting the petals, and adding some strong oranges in the middle for the stamens.

During the paintingof each petal, I used lots of water, both on my brush and in an aerosol, to make the gouache travel along the paper, and to blend with the pale parts of the background, in the hope of getting some lost edges. I had to be ready for some odd things to happen, and each stage was a sharp learning curve. Having completed the first flower, I repeated the process with the second rose and added colour to the gouache to paint in shadows and darker petals where they were required. I was careful to only paint parts of some of the petals to give, I hope, interesting highlights.



 

Once both flowers were painted, I adjusted the shadows, darkened background areas where necessary to make the whites more punchy, and also added a few new colours. To loosen the whole thing up, I liberally splattered the whole painting with lots of white gouache, and a small amount of browns and pinks where I thought it helped the composition. Finally I added some tiny areas of bright red at the very centres of the flowers.

I am really pleased with the effect this type of approach gives to a painting, but although I will return to it now and again, I will still continue to use the traditional methods which I enjoy so much. But it is great fun experimenting!! It may be of interest to note that the painting used one hell of a lot of acrylic gouache!