Gouache Tutorial Video: How to Paint a Mountain

My latest gouache tutorial is now available on my Youtube channel. In this video, I’m painting a mountain scene using a limited palette of four Holbein Acryla Gouache colors: Pale Lilac, Burnt Sienna, Misty Blue and Ash Blue (plus Titanium White). This palette gives me lots of opportunity for value exploration and color harmony.

I’m falling ever deeper in love with Acryla Gouache. They’re wonderful to work with - velvety, opaque, rich, matte, layerable, vibrant colors. They dry quickly once applied but can stay workable for days or even weeks on the Masterson’s Sta-wet palette, so there is no waste! Combined with some colored pencil and Panpastel, I think I’ve found my favorite illustration media. I’ve recently been working with Panpastel and I’m so excited about exploring it more in future videos.

I show my palette while I’m mixing colors and explaining the whole process from beginning to end. Check it out and please subscribe if you’d like to see more!

Painting a snowy mountain scene using four colors of Holbein Acryla Gouache: Pale Lilac, Burnt Sienna, Ash Blue, Misty Blue, plus Titanium White. Amazing photo by eberhard grossgasteiger from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photography-of-snowy-mountain-1366919/ Please subscribe to my channel to see more painting and drawing demos!

More color and value sketches on Arches oil paper

Value and color studies (left) for a 12" x 9" oil painting on panel in progress (right)

After completing a precise pencil drawing at full scale on Dura-Lar for this 9" x 12" painting, it was scanned in. I did a bit of work on it in Photoshop to adjust the levels and contrast, cut the Arches oil paper to 8.5" x 11", selected the option to scale it down to the size of the paper and printed it.

Painting these allaprima grayscale value and color sketches really helped me work out how I should proceed with the larger indirect painting on panel.

For the larger painting on panel, I rubbed a very light coat of unthinned raw umber oil paint on the back of the Dura-Lar drawing and transferred it to the panel.