Painting Across Edges

Alexandre asks:

"I heard you mention several times in Gouache in the Wild (including the painting of the liquor store sign) this idea of 'painting across' edges. What do you mean by 'the secret to gouache is to paint across edges?' Why? What does it do? Is it true with watercolour / acrylic / casein? Why or why not?"

Alexandre: Yes, good question and thanks for asking. That advice applies to any opaque paint, whether gouache, casein, acrylic or oil.

A lot of students when they're learning to paint will do a preliminary outline drawing and then paint right up to the lines. That's fine for a coloring book, but in an opaque painting, it looks weak and timid. And it's hard to get a variety of hard and soft edges that way.

The reason people do that is that they're afraid of covering up and losing their careful drawing under the opaque paint.



Instead, I want the painting to look like one form is painted actively on top of, or in front of, another.

So let's say you're painting a house in gouache. You might paint the sky first, and paint that sky a little past the edge of the roofline, feathering the paint so that you can just barely see your guidelines.

Then when the sky is done and you're painting the house, you can paint back over the line a bit. That sequence of background first and foreground second is the normal sequence for illusionistic painting in gouache. I often call it "background to foreground" or "B2F."



Alternately, you can paint the tones of foreground objects first, and then "cut in" the background second, as I did in this demo for Casein in the Wild. For this one, I painted the sun gradation first in the studio across the whole surface of the page and then painted the light sky and street tones over it on location.


(Link to YouTube)

In actual practice, most paintings are a combination of "B2F" and "F2B." But either way I'm painting across the outlines. When you paint one form positively over another, you can soften or blend the edges as you go. The end result is a sense of joyful discovery in the technique, which I sometimes call "finding it in the paint."

Check out paintings by John Singer Sargent or Anders Zorn to see this principle in action.

With transparent watercolor, it's a little different because you can't really cover up something that you laid down first. Let me save that case for another post.
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Downloadable video tutorials: Gouache in the Wild and Casein in the Wild.
They're also available as DVDs on Amazon.