Golly, Gouache!

Gouache has been this mystery paint to me.  I don't recall every running across it in all the years I stayed up on art supplies, and then came the crayola years of children (and farming and divorcing and working and going back to school, yadda, yadda, yadda) when only later would I find my art stash had been pillaged by curious hands.  So gouache had been unheard of until a couple of years ago, and ignored as I heard acrylics calling my name and I answered their call enough to purchase them but not enough to use them.  Way too afraid of something I knew nothing about, and gratified to learn a friend, whom I Highly Prize, and think of as an artist, also had the fear of acrylics.  We're working on that, but I digress.

Thanks to Melanie Testa's enjoyment of the gouache and willingness to do tutorials on using them, I acquired a set of beginner gouache paints (the only ones in stock in the store I went to, actually) and yesterday I faced the unknown and painted with them.  Cautiously, I might add, but they made me happy for at least an hour.  I don't know if it's because I've learned a lot more since I tried painting with watercolor for the first time since grade school (those attempts went very poorly as all of my Formal Art Training-one studio class in college-was with oils and watercolors are not oils nor do you work with them in the same way, but I digess) but I felt much more in control of these paints.  I set up a basic red-blue-yellow, with white, black, and I think burnt umber, and went to town with a little landscape.  It has no place in reality but I love my Virginia mountains and they are what I draw, paint, photograph most often so naturally I went for mountains, with a pleasing result:

Not spectacular but nice enough as a first attempt and encouraging much more to come. Later today I'll be headed into the sewing room to make some "inchies" which I've been dying to try and just haven't made the time. The wind is howling outside but the sun is out-it was snowing when I got up today-but I captured one of my favorite trees looking especially beautiful yesterday. It's an oddly shaped tulip poplar in the field across from my house; they're usually a very straight up tree but something happened to this one way back when and it's very curvy and branches out all over in lovely arcs.



I'm going to do some sketching of it in my forever attempt to draw a decent tree. It started in childhood. Yes, I had tree trauma, some boy peeing on an apple tree I climbed, while I was up in the tree, and I was certain the tree would fall over right then and there, but I digress.  So it goes.  Off to inchies and other fun stuff!