I don't know what came over me, I've always told myself that painting wasn't for me, I was the ink, colored pencil and watercolor guy. I recently read somewhere that adding white gouache to watercolors can yield a more opaque paint, this intrigued me. I stopped by my local art shop, the one I like to go to is a local shop called Cheap Joe's Art Supplies, but don't be fooled, they sell quality brands for very low and reasonable prices. I picked up a tube of white Winsor-Newton gouache and i've been holding on to the tube not using it for the last couple months and just this past weekend I tried using it for the first time. The following photo is the piece I produced, I've had the concept idea for a long time and only now decided to try something different. What I did was start off by painting the page with a yellow border so that the piece would have a feeling of a glow from the center of the page. I then waited for it to dry and then dampen the paper again and gently added some red to the corners to give the piece the nebulous red clouds. After that dried I used red and black watercolor pencils to sharpen and carve out the clouds and nebula. After all that was done, I took a larger brush and quickly went over the entire piece to let the water soften the all the colors to make it look more like a nebula in the background. From there I began to mix the white gouache with black to get some various shades of grey. I believe the experiment was a success, using a more geometric ship design gave me the chance to really try out the different shades and gave me a chance to try and make a very sharp design. After finishing the ship designs I decided to sharpen up some of the boundaries using a micron pen and a white gel pen. The gouache allowed the ink to be applied with ease as if there was no paint on the page at all, and the gel pen also were applied with ease. I think the ink and gel pen wasn't necessary, though it did help to make the ships "pop" a bit more and using a green gel pen allowed for the addition of some more lights and shiny bits on the ships, like every piece of scifi technology MUST have :)
This was a fun experiment and I look forward to doing more going forward!
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