First Round of Color

Artist Stuart Loughridge is continuing on with his gouache painting after laying in the drawing. He likes to work in stages to be more exploratory in each stage. He uses a minimal palette of English Red, Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, Titanium White, and Ultramarine Blue. He’s aiming for a muted color and unified. It just needs to be visually appealing at this stage. Stuart likes to work from back to front. You may need to build up the pigment on the cardboard, and try to avoid really wet washes. He has a filbert brush, a medium sized flat, and a large flat brush. He does mention that once you commit a brush to a water based media it’s best to keep it as a water based media brush and not to mix it with oil based media. Same goes for oil based media brushes.

He starts by building up the base in the sky with white and a little bit of black. Work quickly because the paint dries quickly. At the early stage thick paint is good. After laying in the water he moves into separating the land from the sky in the background. Now, in the foreground he pulls a smaller brush with yellow, white, red, and black. Be aware of how you’re holding the brush to get the best strokes. Stuart is keeping his values in the middle range- not too dark and not too light for the lay in. Now he mixes up a shadow color and a light color for the trees and uses two brushes to go back and forth between shadow and light in the trees. He explains the value scale he’s using for this composition and how he’s trying to keep it simplified at the moment.

After working through the trees he moves onto the water, again, keeping it simple with light and dark values. As he moves onto the sky he explains how he builds a base of white in the clouds for the color to come later through glazing and scumbling. He uses this principle throughout the rest of the painting, planning for the next stages of indirect painting.