30 Day Challenge Wrap-Up

As a culmination of the "30 Paintings in 30 Days" Challenge Leslie Saeta asks the participants to create a collage of their paintings from the month. I always find creating the collage harder than doing the 30 paintings. lol I was nearly done loading my paintings to create my collage on picmonkey.com when I hit something and the number of boxes changed. I was not willing to start over, so my collage is missing a few of the paintings from my challenge. I hope you have enjoyed following my last 30 days!

Today everyone should be posting their collages and you can see them here.

All my paintings were done with gouache for this challenge. It was a medium I had only worked with a few times before and I thought it would be a good way to get more familiar with the material. Gouache is similar to watercolors yet different. Depending on how you use it you can get different effects. It can be used nearly dry or very wet, nearly fresh out of the tube. 

Many people paint from dark to light with gouache. At times I did that but more often than not my watercolor background reared its head and I worked from light to dark. I sometimes used the gouache very transparently and sometimes very opaque (on the rooster and the avocado). I liked that when I needed to I could cover up something with the gouache, but that usually had to be done with a much thicker amount of paint. It is great for highlights and lighter areas. Although I didn't include any of my portraits in the collage, the gouache worked better for those than watercolors. The skin tones were much easier to do in gouache.

Will I continue working with gouache? Sometimes, but I am looking forward to being able to just do ink sketches or watercolors for a while, so I think the gouache may take a rest for a while.