The Great Wave off Kanagawa

My take on The Great Wave off Kanagawa in Gouache

I started playing with gouache some time ago but could not figure it out. I was struggling with brushes, with paint consistency, and it felt like I was constantly fighting it and gouache was winning for sure. Reactivating paint layers was driving me crazy. I even tried acrylic gouache just to avoid reactivating the paint, but somehow I did not enjoy acrylic ones much.

Earlier this year, I made it my mission to get better at traditional gouache painting. During the learning process, I truly fell in love with it. I’d followed a few different tutorials from different creators and finally got the hang of it and could not have been happier. Now I think it is the best versatile medium ever.

For this painting, I was experimenting with colored ground just for fun and because I hadn’t done anything like that before. I picked the The Great Wave off Kanagawa for my study and I used golden yellow ink for the background and Royal Talens gouache. 

As I was, and still am, on my gouache learning journey, not following any tutorials and being on my own brought many challenges. However, in the end, I’d learned a lot and, as a reward, I ended up with a nice painting on my shelf.