#side note as someone who exclusively uses tubes of paint: how does that himi palette not dry out????

[sourkitsch]

at this point gouache is the tiktok medium to me. looks good when filming 30 second clips of coloring in an area with one stroke but once it's dry it's like why didn't I just use acrylics

Oh god that Himi gouache palette right!?? I hate the way tiktok (and the internet at large ngl) has turned art supplies into trends. Before that it was posca pens. None of these things are inherently bad mediums to work in but they get a (bad) reputation pretty quickly. My personal pet peeve are copic markers, which I think have been out of vogue since like 2017 which is admittedly around the time I stopped using them.

I personally still love gouache! My mom works in watercolor a lot & tried to teach me about a thousand times growing up and it never took & probably never will, so when she let me borrow her gouache set for the first time it was like… a choir of angels singing. I definitely need to have a more opaque medium with a heavier body, and for me gouache has a really appealing texture. The way I work is with a really heavy, colorful underpainting and then slowly build up more transparent layers of a natural skin tone on top. This works wonderfully with gouache and is also so fucking slow. I personally don’t like working small with acrylics so there are a lot of reasons for me to reach for gouache. Hate acrylic gouache tho. I think it’s important for artists to understand their tools and why they reach for them vs. other things! I use the Holbein brand with a set of synthetic Escoda brushes. My paper choices vary from project to project.

Also one of my professors suggested I try casein, a milk based paint that was popular before the invention of acrylics (because I do choose my materials w a lot of intention and acrylics are kind of neutral and uninspiring to me) so I might pick up a few tubes when I have the money and time to play!

#i literally could talk about art supplies forever & ever #my uncle restores old fountain pens and I definitely got the art supply geek thing from watching him & my mom #side note as someone who exclusively uses tubes of paint: how does that himi palette not dry out???? #or is it just that I take 4 hours per small painting and can’t conceptualize working any faster