WWM #3: Picnic Food

The third prompt for #WorldWatercolorMonth!  Here, picnic food.  Bread, wine, cheese, fruit.  Sounds a lot more healthy than burgers and fries, and certainly more attractive to paint!  But, oh, what a challenge gouache is compared with watercolor.  I haven’t worked in opaque medium in years and years and years.  Personally, I don’t like the picnic basket, but the cheese, bread, wine, and (sorta) the fruit look okay.

I started with broad swaths of the major colors, such as the green, browns, blues, and laid in the underlying colors for the bread, cheese and apples.  From there I moved into less thin paint to thicker, working from the most distant (the grass) to the foreground.  At the end, I laid a thin wash of ultramarine blue to dissolve a bit of the underlying gouache to create shadows, knowing full well it would lift and blur the paint underneath it.

While I cannot say I love the painting – still lives are not things I pursue, preferring landscapes – I can say that it was definitely a worthwhile study.  Paint handling is getting a bit more intuitive and logical.  So different than watercolor – but at the same time comprehensible, if that makes any sense.  It’s really just understanding the logistics of the medium . . . And, I think I am improving (a bit) in using gouache, which is a good feeling.  I’m looking forward to the challenge of alternating transparent with opaque medium during #WorldWatercolorMonth.