Home › Forums › Explore Media › Watercolor › The Learning Zone › Twenty White Gouache and White Watercolor Comparisons
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December 26, 2019 at 6:10 pm #481846
If you think your white gouache or white watercolor isn’t really white, you’re probably right. Over the course of many years, I’ve been swatching assorted whites as I accumulate, use, and test them. Here’s a photo of some of them. I wrote up the results on my Hudson Valley Sketches blog post.
It’s really hard to tell how different they are from a photo on a computer screen, but in person the subtle differences are much more obvious. When actually using them, the differences are huge. I’m not here on WC very often, but I’ll update the photo and write-ups on my blog as I accumulate more samples.
I hope this proves helpful to some of you. Just looking at a few forum pages, I see there are a lot of questions and comments regarding white, and comparisons between brands, as well as issues with how the different whites handle in practice. I tried to address as many of those factors as I could, and classify the samples accordingly.
Hudson Valley Painter[/url]
Hudson Valley Sketches -- Reviews/Lightfastness Tests/Art Materials [/url]
One year from now, you'll wish you had started today.December 26, 2019 at 6:36 pm #923909Thanks. I haven’t started using gouache yet. But I am looking into it. So far i have just used white water color paint that was included in one of my sets and a white paint pen.
Marshall
Living the retired life in NE FloridaDecember 26, 2019 at 6:37 pm #923908Thanks Jamie,
Kaylen Savoie
https://www.savoieartist.com/
At least twice a year,paint something better than you ever painted before.December 26, 2019 at 7:13 pm #923910Question: do you really want a true white gouache? It seems to me that most whites in nature are not a pure white but something else. So I would think that using a pure white in your paintings would look unnatural.
Marshall
Living the retired life in NE FloridaDecember 26, 2019 at 9:32 pm #923906Wow, this is great! I will definitely try the Turner. I use a lot of white, mostly for modeling–so painting over a layer of color and blending it in. After using up all my various whites in tubes, I bought a big bottle of Guerra Paint Titanium White pigment dispersion, which I mix with either QoR medium or gum arabic solution. I like this white best, but I haven’t used it to cover areas on its own, only for highlights, modeling, and lately for mixing, since I’ve been painting thickly.
https://www.haroldroth.com/
https://www.instagram.com/haroldrothart
https://www.facebook.com/haroldrothartistDecember 27, 2019 at 9:40 am #923904Question: do you really want a true white gouache? It seems to me that most whites in nature are not a pure white but something else. So I would think that using a pure white in your paintings would look unnatural.
With watercolor, since many of us work on bright white paper, the sparkling white of the paper is hard to beat. That’s why watercolor artists like to reserve the white and highlights where possible. It’s hard for even the brightest, whitest gouache to match the brilliance of white paper. Tinting it is simple if you don’t want bright white, but you might want a different tint than the dull yellow of some of these samples! That off-color will also affect the color and brilliance of a tint, should you choose to tint it. If you start with a dull white, you can never make it brighter, but a bright, clean white will yield clean highlights as well as clean tinted colors.
Hudson Valley Painter[/url]
Hudson Valley Sketches -- Reviews/Lightfastness Tests/Art Materials [/url]
One year from now, you'll wish you had started today.December 27, 2019 at 9:46 am #923905Wow, this is great! I will definitely try the Turner. I use a lot of white, mostly for modeling–so painting over a layer of color and blending it in. After using up all my various whites in tubes, I bought a big bottle of Guerra Paint Titanium White pigment dispersion, which I mix with either QoR medium or gum arabic solution. I like this white best, but I haven’t used it to cover areas on its own, only for highlights, modeling, and lately for mixing, since I’ve been painting thickly.
Harold, I suspect that the Turner has a super clean binder, like the Aquazol binder in QoR, and that’s part of what makes it so bright. Among the watercolor white samples I have (not all of which are on that chart), the QoR stands out as one of the very brightest, if not the brightest. With many of the samples, I noticed a drop of very dark, yellowish binder fluid at the cap. Although I always dug beneath that to make the sample swatches, I suspect that it’s the dark, dingy binders that are at least partially to blame for the off-white swatches. White pigment contaminates so easily. The cleaner the binder, the cleaner the paint! I know that titanium white pigment can vary too, and the binder is only one factor, but it’d be hard to make a brilliant white with a dark, dirty-looking binder!
Hudson Valley Painter[/url]
Hudson Valley Sketches -- Reviews/Lightfastness Tests/Art Materials [/url]
One year from now, you'll wish you had started today.December 27, 2019 at 1:32 pm #923907Harold, I suspect that the Turner has a super clean binder, like the Aquazol binder in QoR, and that’s part of what makes it so bright. Among the watercolor white samples I have (not all of which are on that chart), the QoR stands out as one of the very brightest, if not [I]the[/I] brightest. With many of the samples, I noticed a drop of very dark, yellowish binder fluid at the cap. Although I always dug beneath that to make the sample swatches, I suspect that it’s the dark, dingy binders that are at least partially to blame for the off-white swatches. White pigment contaminates so easily. The cleaner the binder, the cleaner the paint! I know that titanium white pigment can vary too, and the binder is only one factor, but it’d be hard to make a brilliant white with a dark, dirty-looking binder!
I think the gum arabic varies in how clear it is.
You can tell if its aquazol by doing a thick bit of paint, let it dry, then flex the paper. Normally you want to just put on a ultra thin layer of pigment to avoid this cracking, so you might not notice this. When I say thick, I mean if you look at it sideways it is visibly a mound on the papers surface, at least a millimeter or two thick.
Gum arabic will crack, Aquazol will not, or is at least less likely to. This means you can do relatively thick paint with the QoR, which can be useful to really cover up things, but also it can create a texture which later paints pick up. You really can use it to get effects you normally see in acrylics. This is really nice when doing wave froth.
One thing to test is how it reacts when covered up by later glazes, a lot of the issues caused by white are when its used on top, if you use it, then do transparent glazes on top, these unify the picture and can fix it having a glaringly wrong color tone. Ideally it does not muddy up things if you get it wet after its fully dried.
Whites are just like gray or black, the value is just lower, they will gray down anything you mix with them. The value of the color just makes this hard to see.
Brian T Meyer
My Site - Instagram[/url] - FacebookUseful links: Watercolor FAQs - Watercolor Handbook - Handprint - Listing of Watercolor Societies - Watercolor Guide (Pigment Listing)
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