San Francisco CA II Part 5 Gouache Like a Child with Maru Godas Workshop

We met at Arch Art Supplies in San Francisco. Maru Godas, an Spanish artist living in Barcelona introduced us to Gouache. An opaque watercolor medium which main characteristic is the matte finished. We started by making dry strokes and water wash stokes to produce a variety of textures and values with black gouache.

Next we did thumbnail sketches from black and white images in 2-3 minutes each, trying to include mixed textures.

The next step was to make a variety of greys with black and white paint. At this point we needed to pay attention at the consistency of the paint wash, which is creamy, in order to produce and even layer of paint. Right after we made another exercise, a thumbnail to apply the different grades of greys and textures.

Right after that we were introduced to a limited palette that she likes a lot, from where you can make mixes of paint to produce a wide variety of vibrant colors.

The brand we used has a good value, since the quality of the paint is good and price is reasonable.

We walked to the floating houses in Mission Bay. She told us to close our eyes, take a deep breath, picture the scene and image it in on our world, forgetting everything we know about how to draw or paint, to think like a child. There we did a couple of thumbnails in full color.

She suggested to make little dots of mixed paint on the side of the paper before painting our subject. This is useful to see if the paint, once dry, is the color we want. This is specially recommended since gouache paint dries darker that when it is wet. And by the way it dries faster than watercolor. Also she said color pencils (also watercolor pencils) and gouache are bests friends. Since color line brings the gouache paint to life, she recommended to use color pencil to make lines only to give information.

Before continuing to our panoramic or full size final painting, she shared with us more colors of  gouache paint. 

Time passed and I almost missed the group photo, but they found me to present to the group the final paint.

The workshop was fun and the 6 hours passed fast.

Photo by Maru Godas (in fact it was Ramon who took the photo, thanks Ramon!)

Maru is an exceptional warm and talented artist. I was very happy to be introduced to gouache by her in the beautiful city of San Francisco.