Arteza Gouache Paint Review

I like experimenting with my arts and craft supplies to see where they can take me, and I noticed one day when I was making a background for a card using the gouache paint.  I seemed  to use an awful lot of it because it just sinks into the card, so I read somewhere that you can add water to it so I tried that and it worked quite well but it still seemed to sink into the cardstock and I just wasn’t completely happy with the result.

I wanted to see if I could make my paints go further and decided to try some different methods to do so. During my research, which included watching quite a bit of YouTube videos I found some obvious and not so obvious ideas to try. Below are the results and my conclusions. 

As you can see from the pictures above although I got great vibrant coverage but it did not go very far. For my next experiment I thought I could add some water and try and dilute it to make it go further. 

As you can see above the difference with water was very little. It did wash the colour out a bit but that is about all. 

So I went hunting on YouTube as we all do, and I discovered what was called glycerol and I had heard it before but  it was a long time ago when my daughter used it to change melted chocolate into a fondant icing that could be rolled out and shaped and it never changed the flavour just the texture, so I brought some from our local chemist because it can also be used as a mild laxative (never use without Drs advice) and also soothes and moistures the skin, so I wondered what effect it would have on the gouache paint.

Well it does have an effect I put one drop of the paint and one drop of the glycerol on an acrylic panel and mixed it up and put it on the card and it just went on and covered the whole piece of card so  smoothly, and I never needed to reload my brush once and I’m sure I could have covered way more card  if I had wanted to, and also it lightened the colour just a little to a nice softer green which was a very pleasant colour green.

So then I experimented again this time with a simple baby wipe and I used one drop of the gouache paint and then just proceeded to rub it all over the card, the baby wipe is an alcohol antibacterial one so was quite moist, it went on very well and really lightened the colour down to a really pale green, and if you rub it to much you get  little bits of paper coming of so be very careful, but its good if you just want a really quick light coloured background without using to much paint. But my tip of the day is definitely trying the glycerol with the paint, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.  

Until next time when I do some more experimenting.

Tracy Stephens-wood