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Jill MacKay with her gouache painting

January 2007

Photo© Totton Art Society

JILL MACKAY ON GOUACHE

Jill Mackay holds art classes and workshops at her Art Trail Centre at Ferndown, teaching watercolour, acrylic, gouache, pen and wash and Chinese brush painting. There is also a painting holiday at Brantome (north of Perigord in the Dordogne) in midsummer. Watercolour is Jill's favourite medium for landscapes. At our January meeting, Jill demonstrated the finer points of painting with gouache. The subject was a Mexican dancer with many flounces on the satin dress, requiring a subtle use of the medium with graduated washes.

A wash of raw sienna and burnt umber was applied to the dancer's face on 200 lb. Watercolour paper using a Pro Arte round brush. There was no problem adding more washes, since gouache blends even after if has dried, without the nasty edges usually found with watercolour. Hard edges may be softened using a damp brush. Jill prefers to blend on the paper taking care not to make the paint too thick, because a thick layer of paint might crack when dry and she warned against using gouache with acrylic paints. Gouache paints contain chalk [or other white substance- Editor] and are not transparent, so mistakes may easily be rectified by overpainting.
The lilac dress was created with a thin wash with some white highlights left unpainted. Jill added the folds of the dress using thin washes of darker violet or with a drier brush.

Panels of the complimentary colours yellow and green gave an illusion of an architectural background by adding colour wet-in-wet. Throughout the painting areas of white paper were left unpainted to suggest texture. This is easier when the surface of the paper is rough and absorbent. Sometimes she uses pastel to add texture to gouache. Colour can be dampened and lifted out with a squeezed-out flat brush. Jill's tip for adding water to the painted surface or palette without using a brush is to dip a straw into water and create an air lock by placing a finger on the top of the straw, move the bottom of the straw to the correct position and lift the finger from the top of the straw to release the water [Like using a pipette in chemistry at school- Editor]

Jill leaves the darkest colours until a later stage so that the colour does not lift off. Black and purple provided maximum contrast on parts of the dress and black and Prussian blue provided dark frills and lace of varying tones - 'diddling' [Jill's word]- painting the lace using a drier brush. The dark hair and ribbon used washes of black, brown and blue blended together. Jill's philosophy is that: "the more colours that you can put in - provided that they are controlled - the more interesting the painting will be". Jill made gouache look easy to use - and her advice will help anyone to start using it.

Di Alexander T.A.S. Editor