I was surprised how much the stronger wc concentrations impacted the water resistance, and impressed at how smooth the results were. Thanks for another great experiment.
Yeah, not sure about the science of how the acrylic/vinyl binder is affected by the addition of watercolour. If nothing else it will dilute its effect. I was really happy with the smoothness of the paints though!!
Thank you so much for your helpful videos. Appreciate your time and efforts🙏. It is wonderful to see how much we can explore with watercolor if we just have one tube of white from other media, I am curious to try it with Flashe, I am grateful for your ideas and experiments, it is also soothing to hear your friendly voice in your videos 💕
I have been mixing watercolor with white gouache for a while and I was wondering if many people have done this because I have an insanely huge collection of watercolors, the medium I started with. So happy to see the above experiments of yours to validate my hunch that it really works quite well to mix with white gouache and white acrylic especially to create pale pastel colors that I like. I really love how you structured the above experiments, so systematic!
I think this might be great using the big tubes of watercolour from Lukas, they are very good value, are actually lovely paints though some purists seem to think some of their colours are very slightly chalky. But definitely they would provide a multipurpose colour base for acrylic and gouache, and even acryla gouache. This is exactly how paints are manufactured though darker deeper colours will have a different base other than white. The reason they are lifting is because watercolour has a soluble component, gum Arabic. Interesting experiment. So long as your work is protected from moisture then you will have a mostly permanent acrylic result. Gouache of course remains soluble for years unless it has been fixed and even then it is quite impermanent. I have 45 years old work though that is as fresh as the day it was made. I learned to paint with gouache in the days when nearly all advertising was designed with it, colour mixing was an essential skill and all we had was 6 basic, 3 primaries, a dark earth and black and white. Needless to say I soon gravitated to a far wider selection!
Soooo funny... Yesterday I was playing with my several 'whites' (Gouache, Dr. Martin's, white acrylics and aquarel pencils) and wanted to find out how they do in combination with pigments. I tried with a red pigment on black paper. While at work I checked what Helen or one of the others of my faves are doing these days and I found your own red-white assembly line :-) Interesting how something is just 'in the air' and can be picked up by others who operate on a similar frequency. We should try that with 'peace-thoughts'.... :-) Happy painting.
I’ve often wondered about this! I’ve heard other people say that you really only need white gouache to mix with watercolour; however, as they’ve said that, they have had a table full of tubes of gouache 😂. When I travel, I tend to just take a tube of white gouache with me and will mix it a little with my watercolour, but I don’t use it for an entire painting, just for highlights on top of a watercolour painting. Great experiment!!
Full disclosure: I have LOTS of gouache!! (Surprise, surprise!! 😂) Yep, I'm the same - have white in my travel palette. I only have all the gouache because I'm lazy and want to get to my favourite colours fast (or darker colours you can't achieve through mixing with white) though, not because it doesn't work well.
@@helencryer haha… yes, I definitely expected you would have your fair share of gouache 😃, which is why it’s nice that you still did the experiment and proved that it works! I think mixing white with watercolour is ideal for travel, so you don’t have to take as many supplies along, but I’m like you, If I’m home, I’ll probably stick with my many tubes of coloured gouache as well. It’s just so much more convenient. Might be nice if you stumble on a colour that you don’t have in gouache form (and don’t feel like mixing from existing gouache colours though).
I always wondered if watercolors esp. in tubes could be mixed with those large (cheaper) tubes of white like pebeo white to make a gouache equivalent...just never saw any of the artists do it except maybe Sandi Hester. Glad you did this experiment!!
Although I don’t own all the paints examined I watched with interest. Found this informative it may be interesting to see if colours alter at all in time. I’d watched another video with your Flasche paints but, didn’t realise it was paint in its own right. Hope you’re feeling better. Thanks
I'm glad, thanks! Yes, I'm not sure how lightfastness will be affected. I doubt it will be for the gouache, but it may affect things with the acrylic/vinyl. Thanks ever so much!
Nice comparison. As one who's never painted with gouache, a tube of WN designer white gouache used with my watercolors seems an inexpensive way to try this medium.
Yes, definitely! As long as you remember you're mixing with white and so the darker, deeper colours will be harder to achieve without using loads of watercolour (in which case it's probably cheaper to buy the dark gouache paint!)
It saves $ to know that you can tint the Flashe for pastel colors but need to buy their more intense colors to not loose the property of staying put and not lifting. I appreciate your experiment 🎉
The only difference between paints is the binder used with pigment. So using a clear base of any type of binder you prefer with pigment will be paint. Therefore if you prefer lets say gouache over wc then you would use gum arabic and titanium white for opacity. Whereas with watercolor you just use gum arabic.
I think gouache is opaque because it is made with larger particles of pigment than watecolour. Real gouache paints don't all have the pigment PW6 (Titanium White) in, only the more pastel colour mixes.
@@helencryer yeah there are plenty of opacity agents other than titanium white. Windsor Newton often includes a tube of white gouache with their watercolors.
Interesting ideas! Love to play around myself but mostly mixing Gouache with Watercolor.😊 For professional art I would be afraid that in the long term the different binders (not with the gouache) loose/lessen their properties in the combination with the other binder and things like cracks might show up. Or they might loose their lightfastness. Golden for example explain how difficult it is to make pigments lightfast in different binders and that the lightfastness changes according to the binder.
This is a really good point, thank you! I did wonder if I ought to get into how this might affect lightfastness etc, but didn't want to go down that wormhole in this video - this was more aimed at hobbyists wanting to initially try out a new medium. I've added a note in the description box, to this effect, thanks!
It’s a really interesting experiment, I use acrylic gouache, it’s a nice thing to know if I wanted a particular pastel shade I could use a dab of watercolour. Thanks for another interesting and useful video. I hope you’re feeling better. You were noticeable by your absence. Take care x
I am not sure, but wouldn’t you get even more of the original wc color intensity if you mixed the wc with acrylic mat medium, which has no pigment (not even white) instead of acrylic titanium white?
That would be an interesting experiment! I imagine you'd get the intensity of colour and some water resistant quality, but lose opacity, so it depends what qualities you want.
Thank You for the comparison! How about using soft pastel chalk instead of water color? I have bought a few boxes of pastels and tried to familiarize with them but their nature is too dusty.
Very interesting video. Could you do a similar video but instead of using white/light Flashe/Gouache/Acrylic/etc paint, use a black or dark paint to mix with watercolor? You mentioned that the paints you would create would be on the lighter/pastel side; so wouldn't a dark or black paint work as well for darker, more intense colors? As always, love your art process Helen!
It wouldn't work with black, because no watercolour pigments would be able to colour it (unless they had white in, which would produce some form of grey), but you'd have some ability to change other darker colours, eg, mixing red or yellow watercolours with a dark blue to make dark greens and purples.
I am now thinking of making premixes of pastel-colored gouache in pans from watercolor mixed with white gouache to stop myself from buying pastel-colored gouache. I guess we could do the same with acrylics but would have to put them in some small airtight jars to prevent them from drying out.
Fascinating! What would happen if you tint Flashe with acrvlic gouache? That would suit me because I have a set of Turner acrylic gouache. It is not as water resistant as acrylic paint which is a bit disappointing to me, and pencil on top is not great. What I want is Flashe but it’s very expensive here. If I could just buy white……..
I finally got round to trying this out - yes, the Acrylic Gouache (I used Holbein's) mixes with the Flashe paint beautifully. I tried mixes with a small amount of Acrylic Gouache, and then a medium amount, and the Flashe kept its property of being able to have pencil over the top of it really well for both.
@@helencryer I bought a jar of white Flashe and it’s wonderful. It mixes beautifully with the Turner Acryl gouache. My 4 brands of pencils go on it like a dream. Thanks so much for your experiment because I never would have thought to try it, and I wouldn’t have wanted to risk my money on guesswork. I’m so happy!
Interesting ....Flashe "acrylic vinyl paint" sounds very similar to standard household emulsion paint! I'm not a purist and use anything I can get my hands on in my art so I regularly use household emulsion particularly for whites, beiges and greys. Usually mixed with acrylic paint rather than watercolour (I'll try that though!) but I do use household emulsion as an underlayer for watercolour often as it works as a resist. I don't consider my art to be fine art by any stretch ........ but I know that lots of pro artists, eg Kurt Jackson, use household emulsion all the time.
Yes! It also smells similar! I've used household paint in the past too for some projects on paper. I guess we just aren't given info on longevity or lightfastness with household paints, but I bet they'd be pretty decent!
It depends what colours you want to achieve - because you'd always be mixing with white, you will be making 'tints', so won't be able to achieve the deepest and darkest values. If you don't need those much, then yes!
