Sue Cartwright – Demo in Gouache

The Greek Islands

Warrington based artist Sue work in a variety of mediums and is known for her motorcycle paintings many of which are in establishments around the TT circuit in the Isle of Man. We are nowhere near as racy as that so we asked Sue for a different topic with a contemporary feel. 

She opted for a landscape in gouache and the pictures show the build up to completion. She had a prepared pencil drawing on the 140lb Bockingford paper traced from the original and used a limited range of colours – blues, yellows and sienna mixed extensively with white and laid thick on the paper working from the top downwards and dotting about here and there filling in blocks of flat colour on the image.

 TIP----When mixing colours always use old brushes as this will prolong the life of the quality brushes used to apply paint to the paper and clean brushes thoroughly with hair conditioner which is very effective in extending brush life.

Working with this medium is like 'painting by numbers' as just flat bold and bright blocks of colour are used to complete the image and the end result is that similar to the old British Rail posters of yesteryear, although this style is displayed in art shops now.

The traced pencil image can be used over and over again of course to do the same picture in any medium you wish, and Sue had samples for us to see as well as the original of the image used in this demonstration.

Few, if any, of the 17 attending had used gouache to produce a painting, so the interest was there for that reason, and no previous demonstrations have included it either. Sue would have needed another hour to fully complete the work and perhaps if there had been a concentration on say a smaller section of the image done to a larger scale to demonstrate the techniques would have made the exercise even more interesting.

Malcolm Wainwright