Gouache-Procreate Tug of War

Three different ways of achieving balance between texture and finish

I almost didn’t send out a newsletter this week because I’m in the middle of a bunch of longer-term projects that won’t and can’t see the light of day for a little. I spoke to some SVA students with my friend Violeta on Wednesday and I found that a lot of questions came up about using traditional media (like paint!) for editorial work. Working for magazines/newspapers can be quite fast-paced and require some editing/problem solving which involves flexibility that just making a painting can’t always afford. I’d recently done three illustrations for The 19th News (1,2,3) that all required me to adopt a slightly different strategy to make them come together and made for great fodder to explain some of the things I’ve learned about making illustrations!

1. The Still Life

   

   This was the most straightforward of the three pieces that I did for this job: A garden variety still life that signaled a conflict between time spent at work and with children.

   This was the sketch that I sent in:

   

   Looking at it now, it’s so clear that there’s a dynamism in the sketch that’s been lost a little in the final but that’s not what I’m trying to show you. Because there wasn’t really anything in this sketch that needed figuring out or some visual element (like reflection, water, distortion) that might have needed some negotiating before it was believable, I set out to get most of it down in a gouache painting. I anticipated some degree of digital finishing because I have a strange inability to pull a straight line in paint (and this image has lots of them) and because the colours in all three paintings needed to have some sort of harmony so I anticipated some shifting around to achieve this.

   

   This is the gouache base I was working with. I had most elements and colours down. It doesn’t look like it but the jump from painting to final was actually just a matter of filling in a few of these details (particularly faces) and cleaning up some of the lines. This is the most straightforward example I have of when I explain my process as “I start a gouache painting and finish it in procreate”. The gouache painting is doing most of the heavy lifting in this piece, you’ll see how that load is shared differently between gouache and digital in the next two!

2. Just The Shapes

   

   Number 2 was a painting that I already knew would benefit from some time in procreate. Particularly because it involved a reflection and a lighting situation that I felt would need me to be able to move back and forth between drafts/trials.

   I wanted the reflective image of the woman looking at the reflection in a store-type window to be the first thing your eye goes to before you notice the scene happening in the yellow tones: an officer talks to a distraught couple + police tape cordons off the daycare.

   

   I’d let myself start working directly in Procreate on top of the sketch one night while watching TV because I was nervous about getting the colours right. Because of this, I knew that the gouache painting I made just needed to lay out a base and some textures that I could leave in the painting.

   

   The painting was still in its very early stages. I find that for pieces that use limited colour, it’s easier to start with a painting because it’s easier for me to find interesting neutral shades and limit my colours to whatever I can produce from mixing between a couple of tubes. Procreate just gives you simply too many options too easily!

   This one ended up being almost fully digital, its humble gouache origins only serve to make it fit in a little bit with the other 2 paintings in the series by giving it a little dimension and texture.

3. Gouache 🤝 Procreate (Am I using this meme format right?)

   

   Number 3 is my favourite example because it was a rare painting that made me feel competent.

   

   Based on this sketch, I knew right away that creating the illusion of the boy behind the cracked glass would be the trick to this. The cracked plane had to be read as glass, which meant reflections. ugh. I looked at so many images of reflections on windowpanes and took some reference photos of people through shop windows here in NYC. I realised that the transparent, blooming quality of watery paint juxtaposed with a more opaque handling of part of the image would serve me well in creating this illusion! The flat paper cut figures in the front would also be doing some work to make clear the paper-thin fore, middle and background (paper chain, cracked window, boy) in this piece.

   

   My strategy with the painting was to give myself as much texture as possible and as much transparency as possible to work with. I painted far looser than I usually allow myself to with the knowledge that I would be working against the texture in procreate to arrive at something a little more balanced! I was able to keep the bits that contributed to making the window convincing.

   I feel like this approach let me use each medium for what its strengths were to create balance! Truly made me sound like I knew what I was doing when I explained it to the class I spoke to.

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   Thanks for reading this week! I’m currently strangely obsessively trying to track down some of my favourite books from when I was a child. Many of them have frustratingly generic titles like “Goodnight Stories” and “Read With Me Stories” so it’s been quite a task to look for them! I really trust that my parents had impeccable taste in the media they shoved down their children’s throats so I’m excited to revisit some of these as a children’s book illustrator! I will show you some highlights next weekend!