Gouache Painting (a James Gurney pastiche)

James Gurney is an American artist and author, best known for his "Dinotopia" series. While he specialises in realistic depictions of dinosaurs and ancient civilisations, in his free time Gurney paints landscapes using gouache in plein air. Having found his YouTube channel, where he uploads the processes of some of these studies, I felt inspired to give it a go myself.

As with my Jim Butler pastiche, for the sake of convenience, I didn't work outside - I took photos of the locations and worked from those instead. I do think this took out a bit of the challenge you see in his videos (having to adjust the colours as the lighting changes), but I think it was an important sacrifice to make since I'm fairly new at using gouache paint.

One of the things I saw a lot in Gurney's videos was the use of under-painting. Quite a few of his videos began with a flat, thin layer of a warm colour, and that would influence the atmosphere of the overall painting. As an experiment, I created two paintings with different under-painting - one with a warm colour, and one with a cold colour. I found that my base colours kept reactivating, and I spent the majority of each painting trying to fight against them. This could've been avoided by using a thinner coat of paint for that initial later, or by using a more permanent media, like an acrylic gouache.

Admittedly, these paintings didn't turn out entirely how I wanted. I don't think that the atmospheres are quite as lively as Gurney's; instead of having a realistic, more 3d appearance, mine look more flat and simplified. But, despite the fact that my colours aren't 100% accurate, and the perspectives are a little wonky, I still really like the two paintings I produced. I found it to be a fun challenge that allowed me to learn more about using gouache. Looking at the results, I can see how the base layers changed the looks of the paintings - the bottom one definitely seems colder to me.