Gouache (Rhymes with squash. Seriously. I don’t know how that happened either…) is this super cool medium I’ve never played with before. Ever. At all. It’s basically opaque watercolors that dry flat and matte and lovely, and I thought, “Hey, I love watercolors. I think it’s time to push our horizons a bit, experiment and break out of the box, Claire.”

So me and my feet walked to my local art store after work and picked up a new and shiny set (with a new and shiny notebook, because artists always need new and shiny notebooks. This is just a fact of the universe).

Lo: my bounty. my Darth Vader Christmas ornament watches on.

It turns out, gouache is 100% different to use than watercolors, and I’m 100% still finding my sea legs with this paint! It’s interesting, and I’m intrigued and looking forward to playing more with it tomorrow. But it’s always humbling to try something new and have to learn it (more or less) from scratch. Definitely helps kick the ‘ol ego back into its rightful place. 🙂

The best part about painting, in my humble opinion, is the state of my dinner plates when I’m done. (I’m too much of a grump to pay good money for proper painters pallets when, really, anything flat and nonporous works just fine, damn it.)