Jethro In Gouache

This is my portrait #6 of Jethro, created with gouache paints on a white Claybord™ panel. Each of my nine portraits of Jethro presents a different art medium on a 3.5" x 3.5" Claybord™ Tile, created and manufactured by Ampersand Art Supply.

Gouache (pronounceed “gwash”) is a water soluable paint, sometimes called opaque watercolor or body color. It is a mixture of pigment, a water soluble binder, and a white pigment or chalk (the ‘body’). The latter is added to make gouache opaque. Like watercolor, gouache can be altered after it is dry on the painting surface with the addition of water. The opaque property differs gouache from transparent watercolors. Gouache dries with a soft matte finish.

Long used by commercial artists and illustrators, gouache dries quickly and can be laid down easily to create large uniform solid blocks of color. Before digital illustrations, gouache was often used for posters, comics, animation cells and other design work.

I had an old box of basic gouache colors, perhaps used once long long ago, and Claybord is a recommended surface for painting with them. After many years, the paints still seemed moist inside the tubes, so I created a color swatch card on watercolor paper, of colors straight from the tube, secondary mixes, and tints of each by adding more white. This gave me the ‘feel’ for the paints and how smoothly they lay down. I also compared the appearance of values created with black plus white versus those with black plus water.

The gouache paints went down like cream on the Claybord surface, and dried quickly due to the absorption qualities of the kaolin clay and the fast evaporation of moisture from the paints.

For this Jethro painting I wanted to reflect the traditional illustration roots of gouache. I decided to create a cartoon-like depiction rather than a realistic portrait. I set out to make Jethro a ‘cool cat’ (which he is!) with sunglasses reflecting a colorful sunrise. I manipulated one of my Jethro photos, altering the coloring to warm tones, using an image of sunglass frames from the internet, and embedding one of my sunrise photos into the lens. I positioned his head off center and tilted it into the picture frame. I did these compositional steps in Photoshop, to use as my guide for the painting. In the sketch on Claybord, I simplified Jethro’s features and made his face very round.

Technically, I struggled a bit with how easy it was to lift off the dried gouache colors by rewetting. I accidentally lifted some of the blue sky background when my damp hand rested there, thus the clouds! I enjoyed the ability to paint opaquely, painting light fur over dark colors. You can see where I goofed on the side of his glasses and initially put the bar which holds the glasses on too low. It was easy to paint over the dark blue with fur colors and repaint the bar to match the other side.

I finished this Claybord with a clear matte spray varnish, to preserve the soft creamy appearance of the painted surface. Isn't he cool?!?!

Read about my upcoming Claybord presentation below.

Claybord Art Tiles are the same white kaolin clay-coated, ultra smooth, highly absorbent surface as original Claybord but in unique small sizes. This surface and size is amazingly versatile, for a variety of painting applications, jewelry making, collage, coasters, magnets, ornaments, scrapbooking, embellishments, and much more! I love Claybord for the unlimited techniques is allows: painting, drawing, etching, erasing, reworking, glueing, stamping, inking, transfering images, applying skins and more!