Tried out Himi Gouache paint for the first time, and painted three dino scenes. The first one was awful but a good baseline. The second was much better after ChatGPT guided me through the painting process. The third is another baseline to improve upon.
I really, really love gouache, which is a painting medium that can be used like watercolours or like acrylic paint. It is like watercolour because you can add water to create transparent washes. You can also do all the things you can do with watercolour like layer transparent glazes on top of each other, do techniques like wet-on-wet and dry brushing. Unlike watercolours, you can layer light colours on top or darks, like you can with acrylics. Gouache can be very opaque.
However, I'm scared of painting with it, because I'm usually disappointed in the results. My skills are not there. Soo, I have started a small square sketchbook just for painting dinosaurs. My only aim, is to get slightly better on each new page. By the end of the sketchbook, I'll paint a final art piece incorporating everything learned while filling it.
In this session, I painted three dinosaur images. The first one is awful, I LOVE the second one, and the third one is awful.
For the first dino, I just started painting. The gouache dried lighter than I expected, and I accidentally covered the background plants with a dark layer that was too opaque. I tried to use a pigma micron fineliner to outline the dino, but it kept fading out, the ink wouldn't grab the painted paper. I switched to outlining with paint, but really didn't like the result.
This is my baseline dino. I wanted to improve pretty much everything about it.
For the second dino, I asked ChatGPT to guide me step-by-step through the process of painting a gouache dino. I took a photo after each individual step as I went.
The before and after result (left vs middle dino) is a craaaazy leap in quality just by that technique.
For the third painting, I tried to just paint the background and ignore the dino completely. The result was awful in sooo many ways. While there is both a analogous (colours next to each other on wheel) and complimentary themes going, it's just reallly bad. But that's good, have a whole 41 pages left in this mini sketchbook to improve.
I have another of the sketchbooks that I want to use just for watercolour/gouache courses on Domestika. That way each sketchbook has a purpose.