Although I may not have any new art to share, I did recently buy some new art supplies. Last summer I finally began using gouache, and I haven't looked back since. I was only an occasional painter before and generally preferred my markers, but when I did paint I stuck to acrylic or watercolour. I liked watercolour, but find it difficult to control both in terms of consistency as well as mixing colours. Nothing was ever as vibrant as I wanted and would often look muddy. And I feel my art style just doesn't work well with acrylic.
I was always a bit scared of gouache as I didn't really know what it was, all I'd ever heard about it was that it's hard to use which naturally put me off! But I'd seen a lot of artists using it on YouTube and my interest grew until I finally caved and bought a starter set of Windsor & Newton. My collection has since grown to 26 tubes and I have as many as I feel I need as unlike watercolours I enjoy mixing my own colours with gouache. The only drawback to the medium is I've struggled to find tubes of pastel shades. I'd seen acrylic gouache which comes in a wider variety of colours, and was recently able to get my hands on some.
I ordered 10 tubes from Jackson's Art, two of which are on backorder as they were out of stock. I ordered colours that I hoped would compliment my existing gouache palette as I intend to use the paints together as I'd read before buying that you can mix them.
The difference between regular gouache and acrylic gouache is, as you may be able to guess, it's like a combination of gouache and acrylic paint. It has the matte texture and consistency of gouache, but the vibrancy and opacity of acrylic. Unlike gouache, acrylic gouache can't be reactivated by adding water but due to it's matte texture regular gouache can be layered over the top making it perfect for base layers of a painting.
I had a little play with it as soon as it arrived to see what I thought. You can see in the above image that I painted three swatches of the acrylic gouache along with swatches of gouache and acrylic to see how they all compared to one another. The acrylic gouache looked exactly the same as the regular gouache with less transparency.
I also mixed the acrylic gouache and regular gouache together to see how it reacted. The only difference was that when the swatch had dried and I reactivated it with water, it didn't completely blend away and left a harsh line as I'd expected.
After swatching all of the colours I was pleased to see that they match almost exactly the colour displayed on the tube. As these are paints I can only buy online, this is a big help. Ash green and ash blue are the two colours I'm most excited about owning as I think they'll work really nicely into my nature scenes. I'm tempted to collect all of the ash tones now! The two shades I still have to arrive on backorder are Shell Pink and Misty Blue.
I also ordered this brush cleaner from Jackson's Art, another thing I've been meaning to purchase for a while. I've always used old jars to wash my brushes, and because I'm lazy usually end up ruining them by leaving them to soak in the dirty water. Not only does this hold the brushes so the bristles aren't getting pushed out of shape at the bottom, it also keeps the paint particles separate in the bottom of the reservoir so the water should stay cleaner for longer. Well worth a fiver!
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