#30×30, 2025, Day 17: Mo’Gouache, Mo’Trouble!

On the left is my ‘target’ – my 4×4″ miniature, on the right is a 15×15″ enragement< sorry *enlargement*. Hilarious typo. Both are, of course, gouache over watercolor.

Soooooo.

I have to say; I’m not impressed with this attempt.

This is actually my second try at enlarging this miniature. I’d painted this same image the day before and it was soooo bad I didn’t keep it. I won’t keep this one either to be honest.

My goal all along has been to create these miniatures, select my favorites, and enlarge them to ‘full size’ without losing their abstract composition. This one is only 15×15″. I hope to go significantly larger, but it’s a good thing I did this test!

Probably there is a skill issue here, but it’s also to do with Brush size vs. Scale, if you think about it. (Random google image here, thanks to this artist whoever they are).

I *did* use much larger brushes! And I mixed up my little cups of paint! (20ml-ish).

But it’s simply not the same. In the miniature size, you can paint each passage in (almost) a single stroke. I’d need one of these Chinese calligraphy brooms to go up the size I’m imagining – and then you’d need actual BUCKETS of paint – you’d need an entire frying pan of gouache!

Soooo – yes.

Clearly – even with a 2″ flat, I can’t compete with a broom like that.

Brush size vs. Image scale! Right???

I’m also going to somewhat blame the basic nature of my home-made paint.

It simply dries to fast!

The problem with gouache – or acrylic. It leads to a panic-loop where often I don’t have exactly the colors I want, in exactly the right amounts, but I don’t want to be wasting time mixing more color while the existing paint dries.

Of course with oils you can just doodle around with your paint piles all day without worrying about your supplies going bad. And with watercolor, you can mix washes in cups, mugs, rice bowls, teapots, whatever you need.

Plus, as you work, you’re having to remember to mist your paints every so often – or maybe you’ve got your wet towels under your paint – (which I did not try I admit) – but if you’re using huge quantities of paint (in my imaginary wall-sized paintings) – it’s all looking somewhat impractical.

With this particular painting, I end up working faster and faster, and trying to make do with the colors I originally mixed instead of fixing the basic issues. Which leads to a kind of ‘out of the tube’ cartoony color.

It’s just not a great situation.

Too many hard edges! No natural blending!

I have to say – it’s all too stressful :)

Ultimately, in a desperate attempt to resolve the image, I resorted to adding all these detail strokes – to make optical blending – since I wasn’t getting wet-into-wet; and that’s exaclty what I was trying to avoid!

This has happened to me before in acrylics. I end up getting more and more detailed, and ultimately drawing with a little brush in the manner of a colored-pencil drawing. Not the way I like to paint at all. At least with acrylics you can glaze to get blending. Which I wasn’t getting with the gouache. This seems to always leave marks on the surface, very visible edges to any wet pools.

Not sure if this is avoidable, I don’t have enough experience to say for sure.

Probably I am painting too dry and too starved of paint.

In the end; I wanted to preserve the boldness of the miniature – and instead I’ve made a flatter, fussier, busy-er copy, that might be bigger, but sure isn’t better!

So; that’s my day 17.

Actually a few days combined to get this done, what with an afternoon for mixing paint, and then tearing up my first try.

Clearly, this is going to take a lot more practice!

~Marc