New Gouache Work!

I'm so excited to share new work and maybe a new future for what I'll be working on!  After my long illness this summer, I was finally able to travel to Maine and Montana the last two weeks of August.  I took gouache paint with me.

Painting plein air in gouache is tricky -- it does dry quickly on the palette and even quicker on the painting.   The result is that its opacity has a feeling of a screen print, at least the way I've been working with it!  The colors are vivid and unmuddied.  And best of all, the paintings come home exactly as I painted them, no smearing in travel to be fixed later.

As works on paper, to go up in my studio,  I needed to get them framed.   Who knew a 9 x 12"is not a standard size?  Well, I do now.  Nonetheless, I wanted to get them up on the studio walls so I did get them professionally framed for a pretty reasonable price.  I have to build that into the sales prices for the work (presumably, in the future, I'll have some matted and sold from a bin in cellophane wrappers).

Gouache has none of the toxicity issue that oil paints and oil mediums share.  Being sick this summer (completely unrelated to painting) has made me a little sensitive about the issue of toxicity in painting, so I think oil painting will be a less frequent practice, confined to the studio,  and I'll be carrying gouache around with me in the future for Plein air.

The new work is up in the studio and it looks very fresh and different.  I can't wait for our Art Walk this Friday night to see the reaction from studio-goers.