#30×30, 2025, Day 08: Into the Thick of Things
Ok – I’m really starting to like these gouache paints.
These are still miniatures, (still 4×4″) – but they look HUUUGE to me. Like – if they were wall paintings? They’d be amazing!! If only I can pull these off one day at a full size!
Day Eight feels like an important stage in the work – when I feel like I have a few good ones under my belt, so therefore I can take some risks?
Like if I blow it, I can look back at the good ones and defend myself from internal criticism :)
The internal critic is the worst. No matter how many paintings you’ve done, you somehow feel like the next failure will reveal you’re a total fake, and you should just give up :)
At least that’s how it works for me; and that’s why this kind of exercise offers me so much freedom.
These tiny, rapid paintings keep everything feeling low stakes. There’s no risk when you’re just playing around with paints.
I firmly believe this is the only way to be creative. To stay in the sense of play; not in a place you might call ‘performance’. You can’t let it matter if they turn out good or bad!
There is a huge risk around showing your work online, that you might enter ‘performance mode’, where you’re showing off for the audience – and suddenly you care too much what the audience will think.
What do you think about this painting?
If this was a painting in a gallery, on the wall with all the other masterworks, would you choose this one?
I can easily imaging most people saying ‘Ermmm, no thanks?’
Or, maybe not specifically rejecting it, but looking around and seeing something more ‘finished’, something ‘well done’ and maybe they think – ‘I like this realistic one better. It’s so much more detailed. It must have been so difficult to paint. I respect that artist.’ And then two minutes later, ‘Wow, I like this one with a horse in it, I love horses.’
If you listen to these imaginary critiques, you just go crazy. Suddenly you’re painting horses in a field and you’re drawing every blade of grass, and maybe you’re not having any fun anymore :)
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So: this is kind of a dumb comment “Captain Obvious!” here; but – – you can’t do this in transparent watercolor :)
This is the same painting. Before, on the left, with a stand to trees, then After, on the right – with the pines completely removed.
(I very much prefer the simplification. No trees is preferable to some poorly painted trees!)
Mainly the trees were blocking my sense of a distant horizon. So I just deleted them. And cooled off the sunset colors in the sky, gave it a misty, low cloud kind of feeling, and entirely reworked the foreground to make some diagonal movement leading into the center of the image.
It’s completely transformed!
Honestly, I had to carefully study my in-progress pics to convince myself, yes, this is in fact the same painting before and after. There’s two orange dots on the right side, just above the midline? They were my my proof that these are the same panting.
Only a watercolorist could be so excited about this thing, which is so basic to every other kind of painting :) Imagine that! You can paint *on top!* Hahaha!
One last pitch for miniature studies:
I’m pretty sure I’d never do a revision like this on a wall size painting! I mean maybe? But I’m really not sure. Certainly not without a lot of procrastinating, and agonizing.
If this was a ‘real painting’ I’d have to deal with the fear that I was about to obliterate all my work. That I would only make it worse! That I’d be wasting all that expensive paint! All these thoughts that get in your way when you need to make a major revision.
Tiny and fast = freedom!
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One more before and after.
It’s subtle – by if you compare the painting left to right, maybe you can see how I’ve created a stronger overlap in the planes?
There’s a more clear set of ‘steps’ in the terrain. The diagonal foreground rocks cast a blue shadow on the orange step below, leading down once more to the grass-green hill, and again to the blue horizon beyond.
Less dramatic example – but still a pretty good argument for having gouache in your painting kit.
Ok – that’s my Day Eight! How about you guys?
Post me some links in the comments! Show me your socials! – Or maybe you are already sharing on Vivify? I hope you guys are getting into the flow. Things are starting to click for me! The magic of daily painting is working!
See you tomorrow :)
~m
So we are going to use Vivify’s new zoom type feature for a video chat Monday June 9, 5pm PST / 8pm EST.
Just visit the MEETINGS tab on our Vivify pod by clicking here: https://www.vivify.ai/pods/30x30directwatercolor-2025?tab=meetings
There’s a big orange Start Meeting button :)
Uma and I will just chat about how our marathon is going so far, and then open it up to the audience for Q&A.
If you’ve been trying out Uma’s new Vivify platform, please stop by – or if not, you can register with your Gmail in one click and join in!
~Marc
Well – what is this? Six tries at the gouache? Plus a couple days doodling in the park? Whatever I said now would be premature judgment :)
Is it better? Should you switch from watercolor?
Well absolutely not if you like the flow of watercolor!
Watercolor if full of natural effects that cannot be reproduced or replaced; floating color mixes on the page, there are back-flowing blooms, subtle granulation of sedimentary pigment, and of course it’s famously soft gradations.
With gouache; well of course the ability to paint light over dark is the most obvious. But it also changes color mixing completely for me.
I ‘ve been making my gouache from scratch, but even if you were using tubes – I’d be mixing colors with the palette knife on a palette, not on the page. No guessing about the right amount of dilution, or how the washes will lay over each other. You have your piles of paint, and you move them around, cross mix between colors, neutralizing, warming or cooling, greying – you can do whatever you want! You get to have a perfectly customized palette before you even begin.
I’d say; in watercolor you paint with the colors you brought. In gouache, you can mix a new paint box for every scene.
And then there is Contrast. Because the gouache is opaque, the darks are significantly darker. Even if you use black-ish watercolors (Perlyne Green, Indigo, Neutral tint), a watercolor is never as contrasty as one might like.
Even though the gouache will change when it dries (dark colors lighten, and light colors darken – leading to an overall shrinking in gamut). Of course it does contrast up again if you varnish it. I’m using Pebeo Gouache Varnish – but I wont stick with it after this first can runs out, its too shiny for my taste. I’ll probably try the Krylon Matte next – or possibly Cold Wax! (which is matte as well). Some people burnish their painting with wax, just like a car :) Though I do worry about disturbing impasto areas.
So: My thoughts right now?
For high contrast? Bold brushwork? For pre-mixing your color? For broken color (like the impressionists)? For loading brushes with more than one color? Yes, I think gouache it’s worth a try!
But does this count as Direct Watercolor? (Dang it Marc! Why can’t you stick to the topic?!)
I’m not sure yet :) What do you think?
It is absolutely Alla Prima painting – but it’s not watercolor; because you’re not dancing in partnership with the water. You’re making brushstrokes and they stay where you put them. Gouache is more of a directed experience, much less of a cooperation with the medium. You might not guess it from these sketches; but gouache could be great for control freaks :)
Anyway! Lets keep going and see what I learn.
The end goal is to get the best of both worlds. I want to get to the point where I’m combining wet-in-wet and dry brushing on top, and figuring out how to make it all work together.
It’s only Day Seven :) Let see what happens!
~m
#30×30, 2025, Day 06: Dry Brush Heaven!
I like to show these 4×4″ mini’s in a matte, (forcing you to see them smaller at first) because they really look best at arms length. It’s similar to how a painting is meant to be seen on the wall; standing across the room, not with your nose in the frame.
You read the big shapes at a distance, and all the tiny detail is subconscious information.
I don’t mean unimportant! I just mean – the brain can see a lot more than the eye can consciously resolve. You just know it’s there even if you cant ‘see’ it.
But I also love looking at close-ups. People used to bring a magnifying glass to the museum, so they could lean in and see the brushwork.
For me, that’s the two ways to your panting needs to work.
On the wall, across the room (or arms length for a small sketch), but also inches away, staring at the brush strokes. It has to work at both levels simultaneously. Otherwise the subconscious detail is not there for the mind to chew on.
I’m trying to imagine what I need to do to reproduce this effect at a larger scale. I’m imagining house painting brushes – half destroyed might best :) Or using pieces of wood as palette knives.
Ok, that’s it today, saving some for tomorrow!
#30×30, 2025, Day 05: Opaque Watercolors!
Ok! Finally some painting in the studio with my new home-made Gouache set!
This is one of a series of 4×4″ on 140lb cold press paper, with my gouaches, using this ‘comber’ brush from Rosemary and Co. As you can see, the brush is a kind of ‘rake’ that does a really great job creating texture.
Here; some close-up’s of the mark-making. I intended to do more mixing of opaque and transparent watercolor, but I ended up just painting directly with the gouache. I’m to impatient to do layering!
When I paint this kind of subject in oils, I mix the oil with calcium carbonate to enhance the impasto. This is similar to adding the kaolin to watercolor to make gouache, but not anywhere near as stiff.
Of course, I’m pushing the oil around with an actual knife, and I’m using a sable brush here. Still – the feeling is very reminiscent of my oil painting, but with all of the simplicity of a watercolor kit, and of course – the fast drying. With my limited experience, the gouache seems to dry much faster than watercolor, because you’re not soaking the paper. (Unless you wanted to! No reason not to pre-wet, except that I like to paint wet-on-dry to control my edges).
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Here’s a second study, trying to keep up the impasto. And push the scale of the marks.
At this scale (4×4″) the texture of the paper is very noticeable, and the relative dryness of the gouache (as compared to watercolor) give you really terrific dragging effects.
Actually the whole nature of gouache is so much dryer, there is the added benefit of not needing to use top quality paper. It doesn’t really matter how good the sizing is or how well the cotton fibers absorb – because it’s not really wet-in-wet.
So, that’s one thing – you’re spending more on paint, but you can save on paper :) I’m glad to be able to use up a lot of 140lb paper that I have on my shelves, and keep my good 200 and 300lb for watercolors.
Detail shots! This kind of texture is hard to get in a full-sized work. On a wall sized panel, you might need an intentionally roughened surface, like a textured primer. I have had a few accidental successes in oils where I painted over top of an old painting – even after power-sanding, its an *extremely* coarse surface and can look a bit like this at 24 or 30 inches.
Perhaps with this gouache, it’s time to try out a really rough paper! I don’t usually use rough-surface paper – but I might have a few sheets in storage.
Hmmmmmm.
#30×30, 2025, Day 04: Notan!
Trying something different today!
‘Notan’ is a Japanese term that might be be translated as ‘Dark/Light Balance’. It’s a principle, more than a specific kind of artwork, in which the dark and the light elements in an image are in harmonious balance. So it applies to drawing and painting, but it can also be a guiding principle in film or photography or anything really – even architecture or garden design.
I’m still doing miniatures watercolors (+ white gouache) – but what I actually did first was a few pages of 2×2″ thumbnails, and enlarged my six favorites to a *gigantic* 5×5″. Hah! It actually feels spacious after 4×4″
I want to do a few more and choose a few to work up as ‘wall sizes’. Maybe I’ll get one done before the end of the month!
My thumbnails are, of course, just pencil doodles. What I *should* have done, if I really wanted to be doing Notan, is black and white watercolor / gouache. Ideally you want to be visualizing entirely in ‘optical weight’ rather than in line.
But to be honest, I could see what I wanted so I skipped ahead to save time.
So yes, this is a 180 from my colorful watercolors – but I do like to switch it up :) Doing something completely different is a way to reset your thinking.
Sometimes when working plein-air or from a photo, I feel like an organic camera. I don’t need to think when I’m painting on location; it can be a completely automatic eye-to-hand translation. I can listen to a podcast, or hold a (casual) conversation, I don’t need 100% of my brain to paint. (Good thing hey? Nyuk nyuk!)
What I wanted to do with these is INTENTIONALLY DESIGN the image. PLAN the thing as an abstract shape, rather than a reactive kind of ‘paint what you see’ study.
Because really, you need to be re-designing what what you see in every painting.
So yes! For my fellow attention deficit folks – you don’t have to finish a series before you start the next thing :) You can have multiple series going in parallel :)
That’s what I love about the #30×30 marathon. It’s kind of my ‘laboratory’ where I try things out.
I have done this Notan>to>Painting approach before; back in 2019 I did the whole marathon this way.
My prep was done digitally back then – I used a little 8″ iPad mini to make the sketches in ProCreate, just using my finger becuase the original mini doesn’t support the apple pencil. A really fun way to sketch! Digital is the ultimate in flexibility really. Talk about the perfect mix of opaque and transparent.
Ok! So that’s Day Four. Things are taking off! Stuff is happening!
I hope your own marathons are off to a big start.
If you haven’t checked out our co-founder Uma’s new ‘sharing space’, please head over to the Vivify Pod; #30×30 Direct Watercolor 2025 and start posting and sharing! We will all benefit from the community building!
~m
Flashback to my warmup day – taking out my new kit of gouache. This was from before the official start – I’m kind of just wandering around the city, testing my new paints, and thinking about what I want to do #30×30.
These ones are from Square St-Louis, just off the Sherbrooke Metro.
Sorry this first one is a bit of a disaster :)
One of my goals this year is learning to mix the opaque and transparent watercolor in one painting, and use the strengths of both.
This is not that! Hah!
A bit of a disaster – but I did enjoy the day :) We are getting a lot of rain this spring so you need to get out whenever you’re offered a chance!
Clearly; these sketches have very little to do with what’s actually in front of me :)
I’ve never really been any good at perspective and I’m getting more and more impatient with drawing accurately as I get older. Nothing wrong with that! We get good at what we like. Drawing takes energy and attention, and there’s no point spending it on something you aren’t engaged with.
I was mostly just chatting with a friend, and playing with the color – just being outside on a beautiful spring day. So these are kind of cartoons, or caricatures I suppose.
I can feel the potential of adding opaque paints to the toolkit – but I’m also just flailing around right now. But that’s how it goes if you’re painting every day; sometimes you’re not sure if you accomplished anything. You need to just keep showing up for the work and see where it takes you!
#30×30, 2025, Day 02: More 4″ Mini’s!
You can see how working small is the ultimate trick :)
You could probably do all thirty in a day if you felt like it. Now of course – I’m not going to JUST do miniatures. But I’m having fun and feeling the annual rust flaking off :)
I am using photos (mostly videos) for inspiration, but I’m doing a lot of interpretation; just as you would in real life of course. That’s the beauty of these landscapes; they’re really abstractions.
In no particular order here’s some random thoughts about painting from found images online:
I’ve had the great fortune to do a lot of travelling and painting, but I’ll never have the time and money to go everywhere I’d like to. Plus we’re getting older. This is a way I can travel the world.
When I look at my paintings on the wall, I honestly feel like I’ve been to that place. (Even if I haven’t).
These paintings are not *just* copies of someone’s photographs. I don’t have any artistic embarrassment about using found photos. After I’m done, it’s a transformative work, created in my own style from a spark of inspiration.
Transformative work is completely fair game under copyright laws. Nobody wholly owns the earth, and nobody can say an artist cannot use their eyes to look, and their skills to create. Frankly (and you might not like this) the AI companies are about to radically expand the legal precedent for transformative work – I bet it happens this year. Certainly with in the next five.
Plus; my paintings don’t reduce the value of a found photo or video. To be brutally honest – I’m not exactly selling a lot of landscape painting. So I’m not taking anyone’s lunch money. And even if I was (or will be someday?) my paintings are not diverting sales that would otherwise go to the travel ‘grammers. They’re not, by and large, in the business of selling art.
If anything, I could theoretically send them *more* traffic if I were winning prizes or publishing books, and that is what they really want.
We’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it.
And finally – I don’t look for great photographers. (Anymore. There was I time I did) I’ve come to feel; if you use a professional shot, they’ve already made all the decisions about color and composition. More often I’m screenshotting blurry videos with pretty young travel influencer in the foreground, and I’m just using the little bit you can see over their shoulder :)
I feel like If you started with Ansel Adams, you might be tempted to be less transformational :)
I admit: working from found reference *can* get a little boring, so you should still paint from real life as often as you possible. Your eyes have a greater range of color than a screen. I think you need a fair bit of real-world experience to get the most out of reference material.
Plus, it’s just more fun to be outside. The natural time limit of moving light and weather make things more exciting. Painting outdoors is a sport. Painting inside is a craft.
Random note: Sometimes the one you hate at the time grows on you.
Initially I felt this cliff was a dud – mostly because it doesn’t have the ‘far horizon’ that I love. But something about the massive cliff right in your face is growing on me.
It’s more abstract! This could become a great painting if executed with plenty of texture.
But I definitely don’t like this one! I don’t want to look at my paintings and see a wall of identical images – (that would be boring) but I *do* love a high horizon, and converging lines moving inward into the space. Whenever I break my own compositional habits I’m less happy with the whole thing. Maybe this one will also grow on me later.
A neat exercise would be to take one photo and do three, five, twelve versions of the same concept. To show yourself how many different ways you can paint the same thing – starting palette, the design, accidents of direct painting – every time you did it, it could be a different painting.
When you work from photos, do whatever you can to be *actually* working from imagination.
Use bad photos; look at them small on your phone; edit the color balance or temperature; change the season in your mind; work fast; work tiny; work huge; paint from black and white; do a line drawing from the photo and paint from your thumbnail – use any tricks you can think of to decrease the domination of the reference and foreground your personal choices.
OK! thanks for listening to all my rambling. I think this mental meandering is half of the reason I do #30x30DirectWatercolor :)
~m
#30×30, 2025, Day 01: Out of the Gates!
Hey hey! So it begins again! Thirty days of Watercolor! (or whatever :) The annual challenge; can I do anything besides eating and sleeping for thirty days in a row? I don’t know! Lets find out!
So: #30x30DirectWatercolor > Why did we start this thing in the first place?
I am VERY easily distracted, and VERY easily addicted to pointless things; doom scrolling, video games, you know – distractions.
I’m always looking for ways to trick my brain to stay on track; to be temporarily addicted to painting, instead of something less productive. (?) Whatever that means :) Winter always does me in – I think I have seasonal affective disorder. My productivity plummets every Nov/Dec and doesn’t pick up again till March/April.
So this is my annual fresh start for the upcoming summer :)
Here are some tips I’m going to be employing this year:
- Work small: These studies are 4×4″. I love the speed of working small, and the ease of working on more than one piece at a time. (I drew three-up at the same time using some offcuts I had lying around). Watercolor is very suited to working fast (faster you go, the more the color mixes on the paper) and multi-tasking (switch paintings while one dries).
Also; a small footprint allows you to; - Leave your workstation set up: You need a space, anywhere you can leave your stuff laying out, so you can walk up to your desk, blast down a painting, and just get up and walk away. This is how you do one before work, and three before bed, and not be blocked by the friction of getting your paints out or the time-debt of cleaning up at the end of the night.
In the past I’ve put a tiny desk in a closet, used a workbench in a garage, moved a bookshelf shelf three out from the a wall to make a hidden room. These days we just don’t have a dining room. That’s my studio instead.
- Work in series: If you can stick to a theme you can just keep rolling; instead of having to think of a new idea. Again – less friction – less thinking in between you and the next piece.
- Always be looking, Always be archiving: I do a lot of phone scrolling (don’t we all?) These landscapes are mostly based on travel influencers videos. (I take a lot of random screenshots). When you’re going around your city you can be continually snapping compositions. The real trick is: Don’t just save to your camera roll. Actively sort things into folders. Stay on top of your reference. Don’t ever be searching for inspiration. It should be patiently waiting for you.
- Have big plans: Part of the motivation here is just warming up with watercolor, and part is just showing off online (hey its motivation!) but also; I’m doing these 4×4″s now, with the hopes of enlarging the best ones later. Look at them small, and imagine them wall sized!
One of my medium term goals is developing a way to keep my mark making consistent in scale from 4 inches, up to 4 feet.
OK! Starting this thing off with a bang! I hope to see you guys over on Vivify – I’ll head over there now and cross post this stuff :)
Hey everyone!
So: #30×30 begins in two weeks! 30 paintings in 30 days in the month of June!
I’ve been setting up a new plein-air kit, in anticipation for the spring weather in Montreal. We’ve already had our first great days of the season.
This is my first crack at *home made gouache!*
Apologies to everyone who will ask, but these colors here are somewhat random:) I don’t expect to stick with this palette. Right now, it’s just whatever pigments I had in stock.
Two years back, I first tried making my own watercolor, and I’ve been meaning to try the opaque variation for a while now.
I start with my own hand-mixed watercolor; made with powdered pigment, water, some glycerin, and gum arabic as the binder. [ Recipe Here ] The new step is cutting the finished honey-like watercolor between 1:1 and 1:2 with Kaolin (or aluminum silicate) Powder. You are aiming for a final mix somewhat like cake icing or toothpaste. Kaolin is the ‘colorless’ additive that makes the watercolor opaque. It’s somewhat amazing that it doesn’t change the color of the pigments, only the opacity, and giving it a noticeable matte finish.
Now you have gouache!
It’s worth noting: gouache is somewhat fragile, much like a pastel painting. Many people will spray a varnish, or even use cold wax as a final finish.
This stuff can be used just like watercolor (diluted in washes), or picked up like an impasto and painted directly, or blended on the palette into new colors. You can work over top immediately, and alter what has gone down already. It dries fast, like an acrylic, but unlike acrylic is NOT waterproof – so it can be blended with water (or more paint) later, which can make a soft edge; or a mess! Depending!
So many new possibilities for trial by error :) My favorite way to learn!
Anyway what I’m really saying is; I hope some of you will be coming back for the eight year of #30x30DirectWatercolor!
Here’s the rest of my ‘warmup’ day in Parc LaFontaine :)
This one was ‘normal’ watercolor. My first outdoor sketch of the season – I’m very rusty! I don’t know why but I give up on watercolor over the winter. This upcoming year I’m going to do something different so this doesn’t keep happening :)
Obliterating some pretty washes with some ugly gouache :) I hope I get the hang of this soon :) :) A little embarrassing! I wish I could be at Pozan to take Uma’s watercolor class :)
The best I can say is: I’m trying to be fearless :)
At the bottom there, by the way, is the kind of ‘drawing’ I’m doing lately – if you can call that a drawing. I feel some what of a faker every time I say Direct Watercolor because I’ve slid back from the bleeding edge of brush-on-pure-white-paper.
I’m hoping that by learning to effectively blend Gouache and Watercolor I can get back to the purity of complete directness.
Ok, – that’s it for tonight – see you soon!
Citizen Sketcher 