Gouache not Watercolour - The denseness and opacity of gouache, compared to the translucency of watercolour, is easily seen here. Pencil lines of preliminary drawings - which many would object to - can often be seen in watercolour.

Gouache can instantly cover up such distractions so as not to mar the high quality finish in art work that clients demand for calendars, posters, advertising illustrations, and signs.

Don't be a dupe... use a loupe... The Eyes have it... Left the horse's eye from the gouache above (an original artwork) hugely magnified, shows no uniform pattern, or grid of rows of dots, like those that entirely cover the Queen Victoria photomechanically reproduced photo right. That's why images made as gouaches are considered originals - desirable and valuable - and the Queen Victoria photo copy, a reproduction or repro - and cheap. Think about it... In the original work of the horse's eye, you are seeing the actual paint of the original work itself magnified - the real gouache, directly, personally, painted on by an artist. In Queen Victoria's eye, you are seeing only a photographic mechanical reproduction of the photo, not the real photo emulsion itself. Recopying the original surface mechanically - either the photo emulsion, or an original painting or print - with a camera and then creating a copy with a machine printer, creates and superimposes the grid of dots on the image.

Gouache is composed of pigment thickly suspended in water. A binder of aqueous gum arabic is added (to make the paint stick to paper) along with chalk to make the paints opaque.

The gouache technique has been used since the 14th century.

The term gouache is a French word from the 18th century, referring to the Italian word guazzo which denoted water paint.

Art Hider lived in western Canada for a time and his artwork reflected western subjects in this period, including Indians, buffalo, and horses.

Go to Art Hider

 

Below gouache paints.

The paints come in tubes, like high-end watercolours.

The paint squeezes out of the tubes as a thick gel. The colours are mixed with water in the hollows of the mixing plate. The water dish is for cleaning brushes when switching from one colour to another.

Two fabulous marine posters by Charles Lamb show the gouache technique on artwork he created for the Canadian Pacific Line.

The close-ups show typical panes of opaque paint as applied by the brush of the artist on this very artwork. The eye below is 4 mm across.

There are no intermediate photomechanical reproduction techniques applied to these works, that would have covered them with a gridwork of dots.

When completed, these posters would have been printed for advertising distribution, and copies would have been made to include artwork and labeling. The illustrations would then have taken on the grid of dots. They would have been framed and still looked wonderful.

But never like one-of-a-kind original master gouache paintings which these are. More importantly, they would not have been personally touched and touched up, by the master artist himself.