I’m considering this finished; although, there’s room for some clean up and details if I decide to add that. Right now I like the loose sketchiness of it, so I’ll leave it alone for a while. It accomplished what I set out to do, which was to test out this new clay coated surface I made. That has held up really well. No flaking, cracking, or lifting of the surface when wet. It behaved just fine, and takes paint well.
Here’s the final state of the recent painting. I’ve continued to mix gouache paint with the Ceracolor Fluid Wax Medium for this, and used a few drops of their Retarder additive in each dab of paint on the palette. The retarder kept the paint wet for several hours; more than enough time to fit into my work session. This was helpful, but with my experience working with gouache over the years, it’s not really necessary to keep the paint wet (helpful but not necessary.) I do like using the wax medium with the paint. It gives me more glazing ability than using gouache alone. The way I worked the medium in was to dip my brush in a puddle of the medium and then into the paint dab. I would do this every time I needed fresh paint. If I had used just gouache with this, I would likely have had to use more water than I did using this medium. As such the illustration board didn’t have any warping issues.
This is another portrait study I’ve started of my friend, Sarah. It’s on 12 x 16″ illustration board, and I’ll be using gouache paint mixed with wax medium. This project will see how well these two mediums work together.
I started the painting by first drawing lines with an orange pastel, and fixing that with a coat of Ceracolor Fluid Wax Medium. I then painted over this with raw umber gouache paint that had also been mixed with the medium. This worked okay, but I noticed that the paint that was going over the parts I had coated with medium was reacting differently than it did over the uncoated paper. You can see this difference in the bottom of the picture on her chest. The raw paper became a shade or two darker. This won’t be a problem, since I’ll be painting over all this later, but next time I do this I’ll coat all the paper instead of just painting over the lines. That way it will look better. The wax medium will allow me to build up several layers of paint in a way that would be more difficult with gouache alone.
This is a new painting made in gouache. The surface is a a water putty plate 9 x 12″. It’s taken from a series of photos I made while down at Port Aransas a few years ago. They told me they were looking for sand dollars. It was challenging to get all the details into such a small image.
Following my success with using my own gouache medium to make paint as shown in my previous post, I wanted to try a couple brands of commercial pre-made mediums that I ordered online. I bought a bottle of Rublev “Watercolor Medium” and Schmincke “Gouache Binder”.
I used some Phthalo green pigment to mix with the Schmincke medium, and I used the Rublev medium with some red Pozzuoli pigment that I purchased recently to make some gouache paint.
Both of these brands were easy to use, and quite similar to my own gouache medium that I made from raw gum Arabic powder and a little dextrin. They both had what seemed like the same level of viscosity and appearance. In the swatches above you can see the full masstone of the tubed paint, a diluted sample, and a mix with titanium white. The Schmincke medium is a little more expensive than the Rublev for approximately the same volume, and I ordered my bottle of Schmincke from Jackson’s art supply in the UK, which took awhile longer to arrive but they had the best price.
Overall, the results are equal between my own medium, and either of these two commercial brands. It’s much less expensive to make my own medium, but certainly more time consuming and not as convenient.
Yesterday I decided to make up some more gouache paint from some pigments I had recently ordered from a couple of different online stores. I’m still waiting to get a few from a place in the UK, but these three I got from Natural Pigments. I’ve made the phthalo green before many times, but the Pozzuoli and Indigo are new to me.
I’ve started on the Indigo first. I’ve read conflicting information about this pigment with some sources listing it as very lightfast, and others saying it is light fugitive. I’ll be doing my own lightfast tests to satisfy myself on that point later, but I decided to give it a try anyway. It mixes up very easily, and it appears to be a highly staining pigment. I like the color, which reminds me of what is usually sold as “Payne’s Grey” commercially, often a mixture of phthalo blue and a black, but here is a single pigment.
I use an empty paint tube to save the paint I mull. The bottom inside edge of these tubes have a sticky film to help close the tube, but it can get covered up with paint, so I protect that somewhat with pieces of cellophane tape. These pigment jars from Natural Pigments hold about 3.5 ounces of pigment, and I figure I used about 1 ounce here. Just to emphasize the paint making benefits: I can make about 4 tubes of paint from this $10 jar, and I’m choosing a paint color that isn’t available commercially. Rhe amount spent on the binder is just pennies, or there are some companies like Da Vinci, Schmincke, or Sennelier that sell the binder premade. I strongly encourage people to experience making their own paint. It’s a little time consuming (this took about 2 hours from set up to clean up,) but very much worth the effort.
This is the finished product in a 37 ounce tube ready to use. I’ve make a couple test swatches, and will put one in a south-facing window for awhile to test its lightfastness. I’ll use this occasionally, in the meantime, for studies and sketches.
Here’s the latest version of my painting of Gina. It’s mostly finished, but I may keep making a few minor tweaks. I added some color to her face from what I showed last time, and finished the rest of the painting.
Here’s an update on my painting of Gina that I started. I wanted the light to be bright on her face, but it might be a little too washed out. I’ll keep going with the rest of it, however, and then touch things up later.
I’m painting again. Started working on this today. It’s based on an old photo of mine of a friend, Gina, applying mascara as she looks in a mirror. The surface is a 9×12″ piece of white ABS plastic. I first made a line drawing of the photo to scale, and then transferred that to the panel. The paint is gouache, using raw sienna with a bit of yellow. I have a couple different ideas of where to go from here, and will probably merge them together somehow.
I’m finally back with a new post. This one has to do with combining two or three mediums in a manner not commonly though of : gouache paint, cold wax, and alkyd medium. Gouache, as you likely know, is an opaque watercolor paint that uses gum arabic as its binder. Cold wax is a wax paste typically made with just beeswax; although, some other waxes may also be added. The alkyd medium I’m demonstrating here is Winsor & Newton’s Liquin. Gamblin also sells a similar medium called Galkyd.
The most common advice given when painting with gouache is you should never allow the paint to get too thick, since the binder cannot support any more than a few thin layers. This is important advice if you’re using just paint; however, like many art rules there are ways around them. In this case you can add the paint to the cold wax to increase the thickness. I should mention that this is also possible by adding acrylic pastes or gels to gouache. (NOTE: see update below) The benefit that wax offers is that once it hardens you can scrape back into the layers to achieve interesting effects or textures that can’t be done in dry acrylic. Acrylic will dry fast, whereas the wax will take several hours to harden before it is stiff enough to add another layer, which can be an advantage if you’re working at a large size.
For this demonstration I used Gamblin’s Cold Wax Medium. It’s made with beeswax, their mineral spirit solvent called “Gamsol”, and Galkyd. There are other brands on the market as well. It’s also not too difficult to make it yourself from raw materials. Some brands use damar crystals as the resin instead of alkyd. Some also use turpentine as the solvent instead of mineral spirits. Dorland’s Cold Wax adds paraffin and microcrystalline wax along with beeswax, and it has been the smoothest brand I’ve tested. To make cold wax myself, I’ve used 11 parts melted wax, 1 part alkyd resin, and 11 parts spirits. Add more or less of each to adjust the consistency to your liking.
In application, I mix in equal amounts of paint to wax. For more transparent pigments, such as most yellows, you’ll likely want to use less wax, but I would recommend keeping the amount above @ 25%. The more gouache paint you have in your mix, the thinner your layer should be. All of your paint layers should have at least 25% or more wax, since the water content of gouache will not allow it to adhere to the waxy surface without that.
In the image above you can see how thick the paint and wax mixture is. The blue swatch on the left was laid down on this illustration board surface using a brush. I smoothed it out some by rubbing it with a paper towel. This thin layer took about 4 hours until the wax was hard enough to paint over. For the pink layer on top of it I first diluted the paint some with water, and when mixed in the wax, the water caused a sort of resist where the paint bubbled up in an interesting texture. The blue swatch on the right was applied with a paint knife, much thicker as you can see. This took about twice as long to harden as the other swatch. The yellow ochre was applied with paint that had been thinned more with Liquin, and I was still able to get some thick peaks of paint shown on the right. These Liquin layers also dry slowly, in about a day.
There’s more experimenting to be done with this gouache and wax combination. I should mention that casein paint can be mixed this way, and oil paint, of course. Oil pastels can also be used in combination with this, anything that has a soft wax binder. Acrylic paint I’m unsure about, since I’ve always read that it doesn’t mix properly with wax. I’ve made a successful wax paste by melting the wax and adding borax and no solvent, which I’ve written about before. I should do some more experiments with that as well. There are many cold wax paintings on youtube you may want to browse through if you’re curious.
UPDATE: I sent an email to Gamblin’s Product Specialist to get an official comment about combining their cold wax with gouache paint. Today she replied that she advised against doing this, saying cold wax was specifically designed for use with either oils or alkyd paints. The bonding with gouache would be “limited,” in her opinion and less stable. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work, just not as well. Instead, she recommended using an acrylic heavy gel or paste to get similar results and proper bonding. On that note: where I wrote above that acrylic mediums cannot be carved into, I’ve learned that is not completely true. There is a hard molding paste made by Golden that lets you carve into it; although, not in the same way as you can with a softer wax.
Here’s my second version of the study I posted previously. This time I used a larger sheet of illustration board, 16×12″. Still used gouache, except I toned the initial layer with sepia shellac ink (first image.)
I had orignally planned to do this in full color, but this two-color look was too appealing to cover up. Maybe I’ll do yet another version. That’s allowed, isn’t it? The woman’s name, by the way, is Julie. She and I worked in the Shipping department of a computer store many years ago. I hope she stayed with that singing career she was starting.
I started this new gouache painting on a small sheet of paper I picked out, based on an old photo I found in my archive files. Unfortunately, the paper was too thin to hold up well to the water I was laying down, so I had to stop here. It was a good warm up, however. I’ll give her another go on a thicker sheet, maybe illustration board I picked up recently that’s also larger. This is 9 x 12.”
Artwork by D. B. Clemons 