In Class Demo

Here's a little gouache in class demo I didn't get to finish in class - I'm still trying to figure out how to a finish in an hour.   I'm just going to walk through the process a bit.

Here's the finished piece.

Hour 1:  Working thin, and not using the full opacity of the gouache, I'm laying some basic warms and cools, focusing a bit more in the cools in the shadows.  Im basically laying on some color and then subtracting out to maintain a little bit of a value structure.  In all of these color in the face, I have a little bit of a pale coppery blue-green (besides the hair).  I want that to be a unifying theme color.

 Hour2: I kind of liked how the warm we're looking on top of the cool - so I decided to warm the whole thing up a bit, and lay in the background color.  I'm also starting to shape the hair a bit, and looking at how all those curls are working structurally.

Hour 3: Ok - so I like the warm, but now its too warm - so I bring back my tealy base color: a little darker, in the sky, and bit cooler on the ground.  In the sky, I'm painting thick on top, going lighter on the bottom toward the horizon, so I can have a little dusky feel.  I subtract out some secondary highlights in the hair, and add some darks in the hair.  This is why I love gouache - you can still make some big changes, and blend.

 Hour 4:  I figure I'll work in a little narrative imagery, and after listening to a podcast about the wizard of Oz, I figure I'll make it about a woman who finds religion after her house is destroyed by a tornado.  I add some cools in the hair - same cools as the ground color.  I also threw in a white morning glory in her hair.  I want to pull the foreground forward, so I added some more warms to the ground, and a few stars in the sky.  I also like the pale of her eyes after hour 1, so I brought back the pale blue.