Gouache paints are sometimes used to create landscape paintings.
Gouache paint looks like watercolor, but is opaque instead of transparent. Designers and fine artists often use gouache to paint realistic, three-dimensional-appearing pictures. Originally used to illuminate religious manuscripts and texts in the Middle Ages, gouache became popular with the 18th century Pre-Raphaelites and the 19th century French Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. The paint's brilliancy and opacity make it a favorite of painters working in a highly detailed, illusionistic style to convey a sense of depth.
Instructions
1. Add depth to a gouache landscape painting by drawing the scene using linear perspective. Compose and draw a detailed, illusionistic landscape scene on heavy watercolor paper. Establish vanishing points and use them to three-dimensionally depict elements of the landscape composition. Draw objects in the landscape to scale, so they appear to recede into the distance. Make distant objects progressively smaller the further away they are. Overlap close objects over distant ones.
2. Dilute the gouache with water to thin it for the initial layers of paint. Mix the gouache in the cups of a watercolor palette. Lay down tonally graded washes for the sky and ground to suggest depth. Paint the sky darker at the top and lighter close to the horizon. Paint trees and mountains lighter at the top and darker at the bottom, as they appear in nature from the effects of ambient sunlight.
3. Use aerial perspective to create an impression of depth. Tint the gouache colors with a little blue when painting far-away objects and landforms to imitate atmospheric effects. Paint the edges of objects with bluish colors to make them seem to recede into the background. Portray distant forms and objects indistinctly, with less detail, contrast and fewer value changes. Add a little water to the background colors when dry and blend them together with a flat brush.
4. Take advantage of the brilliancy of gouache colors to simulate depth in landscape paintings. Take color-painter Hans Hoffman's advice and set up a "push and pull" depth effect using warm, fully saturated, darker colors in the foreground and lighter, cooler, duller colors for the background. Use colors with neutral values and midtemperature hues such as reds for the middle ground of the picture. Use thicker paint with textured brush strokes to make it come forward off the picture plane.
5. Simplify background details and paint them with fuzzy edges. Paint foreground details boldly and with high contrast so they seem to jump out at the viewer. Add a little white to the gouache to increase its natural brilliance. Juxtapose fully saturated complementary colors to make them seem even brighter and more contrasty. Use deep blues and violets next to bright yellows and oranges to create a sense of depth from the suggestion of sunlight and shadows.
