Opaque WC
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(Excerpts from ART HARDWARE: The Definitive Guide to Artists’ Materials, by Steven Saitzyk © 1987) The first watercolors were opaque and were referred to as "body color." Exactly how body color took on the French name "gouache" has been a matter of speculation for some two hundred years. The LeFranc & Bourgeois Company says, "The word `gouache' comes from the Italian guazzo, which means the mixing of water, glue, and pigments." Today, opaque watercolor is known as gouache, poster paint, designers' colors, and tempera. The terms "tempera" and "poster paint" are used for the lesser qualities of opaque watercolor, which are not acceptable for fine artwork. Gouache and designers' colors are acceptable for fine artwork with certain reservations. Almost all the commercially available gouache is made more for use by illustrators and designers, for whom having a particular color sometimes outweighs permanency. It is not unusual to find a considerable number of fugitive colors offered in lines of gouache, and these must be avoided by the fine artist. Gouache also has other drawbacks. If, for example, it is applied too thickly, as is done in acrylic or oil painting, it will tend to crack. The use of a rigid support will improve, but not correct, the problem. Bleeding and staining of colors are more common in gouache because of the greater percentage of dye-pigments used in its manufacture. Gouache is made in much the same way as transparent watercolor. However, it is rarely ground as finely and has a much lower concentration of pigment because of the addition of white and other additives, which are designed to improve leveling properties and slow the rate of drying. Gouache is made this way to allow the artist to apply a flat, opaque field of color with a minimum of dilution or mixing and to achieve a look very different from watercolor. There seem to be three types of gouache on today's market. The first places emphasis on opacity, even to the extent of limiting the color range. Winsor & Newton's Designers Gouache is an example of this. There are some seventy colors, with several grays, blacks, whites, and a gold and a silver, most of which are quite opaque. LeFranc & Bourgeois's Designers' Gouache is an example of the second type, where the emphasis is on color range rather than opacity. It manufactures fifty-four more colors than Winsor & Newton, in addition to the several whites and blacks, but the paints are, on the average, slightly less opaque. In the last type, quality dominates both color range and opacity. The German company H. Schmincke, recently reintroduced in the United States after a long absence, makes a line of double stone-ground gouache of the same quality as its extra-fine artists' watercolors. This paint is very finely ground and is more like the original gouache formulations intended for fine art. The information in Schmincke's color chart indicates that only the most permanent pigments available are used. This gouache is so fine that it is rated to be used in a 0.3mm airbrush without clogging (recent tests show that it works just as well in a 0.1mm airbrush). (Excerpts from ART HARDWARE: The Definitive Guide to Artists’ Materials, by Steven Saitzyk © 1987) |
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