the gouache came!

I was excited to find my gouache order on my doorstep on Wednesday after work. I couldn't get in the house fast enough to unwrap it! I don't have an official palette yet - I want to make one out of a small tin, so I squeezed out the three primaries and the three secondary colors into a small divided porcelain painting dish to get started. Oh - and white in the center section. Out came the onions again. The paints felt new and weird and before you knew it, I had worked the first onion to death. Even the white gouache couldn't save it. What a dark and muddy onion. Oh well...


So I flipped the onion over and tried again. This time I remembered that less is more and quit before the cause was lost.


Still wanting a top view, and by now being very familiar with this particular onion, I did another version. This time I felt more comfortable with the paint and was pretty pleased with the rendition.


Back to the kitchen to see what else I could find. Aha! A leek!

The Schmincke colors are quite brilliant! Maybe not quite as brilliant as they show on the computer screen, but very clear and bright. Very intense. I think I will like these a whole lot. And... I know that watercolor purists strive to save the white of the paper on the page for their highlights, but I just never did very well at that. I admire it when I see it, but I have to admit that I like the opaque white gouache for letting me go back and lay in a very rewarding highlight. Yum!