Gouache. It’s not only a kind of fun word to say (Goo-wash) I feel like it’s the perfect traditional medium for illustrators. And for as long as it’s been around, it’s not very well known, oddly. If you love experimenting with watercolor take a risk and play around with gouache some time. If you’re an acrylic artist it also bears some resemblance.

I like to describe gouache as the perfect balance between watercolor and acrylic. It has the watery consistency of watercolor and yet you can layer and it will have the opaqueness of acrylic. While you can certainly use it more translucently like watercolor, it has one key difference.

When watercolor dries, it typically will dry lighter than when you painted it on. When you paint with gouache, it depends. Often lighter colors will show up darker after they’re dried, and darker colors will show up lighter after they are dried.

See the Difference

There are a billion tutorials on YouTube about working with Gouache, I’m sure you can do a quick YouTube search to find them, so instead I am going to share some quick examples on the visual differences between the two.

In my watercolor pieces you can see how much lighter and more airy my colors are. This is not the same piece, but same subject matter, my cat Fox! She passed away in 2022 but she was a beautiful, sassy, cat.

The depth of black I’m able to achieve with gouache is almost completely matte as you can see on the base of her tale in the more abstracted piece. You can see how the purple color behind her is almost completely solid as well. This is almost impossible with watercolor without layering and would almost certainly require a thicker weight of paper or risk warping or piling. Using tube watercolors you could make a solid effort but probably not the most efficient use of your supplies.

However, it’s not impossible to get beautiful bold colors in watercolor. With the right quality of watercolor paint and absorbency of your paper, you can get dynamic ranges even without layering as seen in this piece I made called, “Climbing”.

If you’re curious about the snippet of my watercolor palette there my favorite watercolors are from this brand sold on Amazon for between $30-50 depending on the size: Kuretake

In the close-up, you can still see the texture of the paper, that soft graininess coming through due to the translucency of the watercolor. The two mediums have their strengths and weaknesses depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Also remember, because they are both water based, you don’t actually have to select one over the other for a single piece, you can use them both in conjunction and achieve some interesting effects.

A while ago I created some studies with gouache because I wanted to play around with the blend-ability of the medium. In watercolor, it’s pretty easy to blend one color into another seamlessly. To achieve the same effect, and get a nice smooth transition, it can be a little more challenging with gouache. It can dry as fast as watercolor depending on various factors, so it helps to do a little planning ahead in terms of what colors you want to blend. This is probably true of any intentional artwork though.

In these Studio Ghibli-esque pieces, you can see the effects of blending most prominently in the fire surrounding stylized Calcifer (the flame character) and in the water under the Totoro’s. It took some trial and error to get the blending effect around Calcifer. It is best to keep your gouache wet to blend, so you do need to work quickly (which is where the planning ahead on colors came in handy).

There is a unique feature when it comes to water medium’s that is both awesome and sometimes really annoying. You can activate the color on the page again just by adding water. This is particularly annoying in gouache when you are attempting to achieve a solid matte color and you accidentally add too much water, pushing it back towards a more translucent state.

When you’re trying to layer a new gouache color over an old gouache color, this can sometimes lead to colors blending into a muddy mess unintentionally, much like oil-paint. It’s best to ensure your brush isn’t saturated in water, and the layer is fully dry, if you’re trying to lay opaque color over opaque color. However, if you’re trying to re-active color to achieve a blending effect, or perhaps just pick up where you left off from a previous painting session, water mediums can give you some of that freedom without much fuss.

In this final study I completed, which is inspired by the cover art to one of my favorite ChillHop stations (artist credit: Gyuki), I experimented with natural elements like grass and stone. And I finally started to understand why Studio Ghibli, uses gouache for their background art.

This is all entirely gouache and it nicely demonstrates the range you can achieve. The background feels closer to a watercolor-style translucency and contrasts with an opaque and neatly rendered subject and mid-ground. In a way, it creates a depth of field effect .

You might also notice the brand and type of gouache I was using. There are many different brands of gouache and like watercolor they come in dry palettes and tubes. However, more uniquely, you’ll find gouache in these little small rectangular containers adorably known as “jellys”. The brand I used for this piece were MIYA jellys, but I also have used HIMI (they feel very similar to me). For the Ghibli fan art, I used a combination of Arteeza tubes and Royal Langnickel tubes; both relatively in-expensive. I have not played around with a dry palette, as they don’t seem to be as common but you can find them. When you’re just getting started, you definitely don’t need top of the line, but it is good to experiment with different brands to find what you prefer.

While I have a couple of jelly sets, I have settled on preferring the tubes over the jellys. For me, the jelly sets are difficult to keep moist, which means they end up just drying up into big blocks. There are some tricks to this, but for me, it’s much less hassle if they can remain in tubes with a cap I can tighten to keep the moisture locked in – just a personal preference.

Art Therapy

I wanted to include a section on art therapy as I am studying to become a counselor and eventually art-therapist.

From an practical perspective you can break out a set of watercolors or gouache fairly easily. They aren’t terribly messy and require little space to setup. As far as brushes, you can use any standard watercolor brushes. The jelly’s I would imagine may be a bit messier for children, so tubes or a dry set may be more ideal if you’re trying to cut down on mess (and not waste supply). Half the fun of art is to get messy though, so this is all up to individual preference.

One of the things I love about watercolor is that it requires a bit of a delicate hand and some skill to get the paint to move the way you want on paper. A lot of this depends on paper type and water saturation, brushes, etc. However, I think the challenging thing for folks, is the lack of control you can sometimes feel with water color. It tends to soak into the paper a little unpredictably at times, especially if you are new to it. The reason I like this aspect is because it challenges us to let go a little. Feeling out of control or not being able to create what one is visualizing can be a frustrating experience. But if we’re not worried about that, and just enjoy the sensations of a soft water brush gliding across paper and enjoy the melting of colors, water color can be a beautifully freeing experience.

Gouache has some of those same kinds of traits, however, it allows a bit more control. You can mess-up and cover up a dark blotch w/ a white blotch like white-out. I also like how you can play with different ranges of translucency. What stories might we tell when allowing certain colors to be transparent and others to be more grounded and solid? Gouache is a happy medium (see what I did there?) between that sense of fluidity and providing room for a more controlled experience.

In this artist’s opinion, gouache deserves more time in the spotlight. While watercolor has its own eloquence and beauty, I encourage you (and your clients) to experiment with gouache when you’re feeling bold!

I’ll share one YouTube video from artist, Karen Cheok, who demonstrates the beauty of landscape painting with gouache inspired, again, by Studio Ghibli in this relaxing to watch tutorial.

And one of my favorite artists I follow on Instagram: Justin Donaldson who also offers gouache courses here!

Happy Painting!