Gouache

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Gouache

Gouache (rhymes with "squash"), the name of which derives from the Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
guazzo, "water paint, splash" or bodycolor (the term preferred by art historian

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e.genre, design, format, and look.This includes the "major" arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture as well as the "minor" arts of ceramics, furniture, and other decorative objects....
s) is a type of paint

Paint

Paint is any liquid, liquifiable, or mastic composition which after application to a Substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film....
consisting of pigment

Pigment

A pigment is a material that changes the color of light it Reflection as the result of selective color absorption. This physical process differs from fluorescence, phosphorescence, and other forms of luminescence, in which the material itself emits light....
suspended in water

Water

Water is a common chemical substance that is essential for the survival of all known forms of life. In typical usage, water refers only to its liquid form or States of matter, but the substance also has a solid state, ice, and a gaseous state, water vapor or steam....
. Gouache differs from watercolor

Watercolor painting

Watercolor or Watercolour is a painting method. A watercolor is the Processing medium or the resulting Work of art, in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water soluble vehicle....
in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, and an additional, inert, white pigment such as chalk

Chalk

Chalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. It forms under relatively deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....
is also present. Like all watermedia, it is diluted with water.

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Encyclopedia

Gouache (rhymes with "squash"), the name of which derives from the Italian

Italian language

Art history

Paint

Paint is any liquid, liquifiable, or mastic composition which after application to a Substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film....
consisting of pigment

Pigment

Water

Watercolor painting

Chalk

Gum arabic

Gum arabic, also known as gum acacia, chaar gund or char goond, is a natural gum made of hardened sap taken from two species of the acacia tree; Acacia senegal and Acacia seyal....
is also present as a binding agent just like in water color.) This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities.

History

"Guazzo" was originally a term applied to the early 16th century practice of applying oil paint

Oil paint

Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint consisting of small pigment particles suspended in a drying oil. Oil paints have been used in England as early as the 13th century for simple decoration, but were not widely adopted for artistic purposes until the 15th century....
over a tempera

Tempera

File:Duccio The-Madonna-and-Child-128.jpgTempera is a type of artist's paint and associated Art techniques and materials that were known from the classical world, where it appears to have taken over from encaustic painting and was the main medium used for panel painting and illuminated manuscripts in the Byzantine world and the Middle Ages...
base. The term was applied to the watermedia in the 18th century in France

France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
, although the technique is considerably older. It was used as early as the 14th century in Europe

Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
.

Application

Gouache generally dries to a different value than it appears when wet (lighter tones generally dry darker, while darker tones tend to dry lighter), which can make it difficult to match colors over multiple painting sessions. This, combined with its quick coverage and total hiding power, mean that gouache lends itself to more immediate techniques than watercolor. "En plein air

En plein air

En plein air is a French language expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors....
" paintings take advantage of this, as do works of J.M.W. Turner and Victor Lensner. It is used most consistently by commercial artists for works such as posters, illustrations, comics, and for other design work. For example, comics illustrators like Alex Ross

Alex Ross

Nelson Alexander "Alex" Ross is an American comic book Painting, illustrator and plotter, acclaimed for the photorealism of his work. Ross is known for his love of the vintage looks of classic characters and the more mythology elements of the superheroes....
use mostly gouache for their work. Industrial Designer and Visual Futurist Syd Mead

Syd Mead

Sydney Jay Mead, commonly Syd Mead, is an industrial designer best known for his vehicle designs in science-fiction films such as Blade Runner, Aliens , and Tron ....
also works primarily in gouache. Most 20th-century animation

Animation

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of Motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways....
s used it to create an opaque color on a cel

Cel

A cel, short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn traditional animation. Celluloid was used for animation and film production up until the late 20th century, however, it burned easily and suffered from spontaneous decomposition, and was largely replaced by cellulose acetate p...
with watercolor paint used for backgrounds, and gouache as "poster paint" is desirable for its speed and durability.

As with all types of paint, gouache has been used on some unusual papers or surfaces.

One variation of the medium is gouaches découpées created by Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was a France artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draftsmanship. As a drawing, printmaking, and Sculpture, but principally as a Painting, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century....
, cut paper collage

Collage

Sorry, no overview for this topic
s. His Blue Nudes series is a good example of the technique.

Gouache

History

Application

See also

External links