Brush Sketching

Gouache is similar to watercolor in that both are water media but gouache's pigments are combined with chalk for opacity. With the addition of chalk, the ratio of pigments to arabic gum and water is much higher than in watercolor. This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective properties. One difficulty in mastering Gouache is that most of the time it dries to a different value than when it is wet. Dark colors dry lighter and light colors dry darker. This makes it difficult to control values in a painting. Nevertheless, gouache dries to a beautiful matte finish, is very durable, and dries very quickly.

In the sketches above I used gouache's range of possibilities from watercolor transparency all the way to very opaque. This time I used a direct approach - straight brushwork, without pencil sketching.