Gouache Workshop with Ellen Langford

When we create, with a balance of intention and letting go, we can make room to channel the divine. Using gouache paint as a medium of expression, we can more fully express our experience of this world.

Description:

Learn techniques of painting in gouache, an ancient opaque watercolor medium. Ellen has painted in gouache from the Isle of Wight to Horn Island and the entire length of the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine. It’s a great medium for travel or home. Toulose LaTrec painted in Gouache at the famous nightclub, Moulin Rouge.

Supply list:

I use the M.Graham brand (available through Amazon) but Windsor Newton is fine. Or others, just don’t get “acrylic gouache”.

What colors?

These four make up the “Zorn” palette, with which you can do so much:

Titanium white

Mars Black

Cadmium Red Light

Yellow Ochre

You can also supplement with others, like ultramarine blue, naphthalene red, sap green, cadmium yellow. For your more traditional earthy colors- burnt sienna, burnt umber.

The brushes I use are something like these travel brushes: https://a.co/d/2PiR6tx

I also like a “bright” which is a flat brush for getting good edges and filling larger space. Maybe 1/2 inch to 3/4inch

A small bottle for clean water,

Small jar or empty aluminum can for your paint water

Pencil (for class just a #2 is fine. In art pencils I like a softer- like a 3B or so)

Kneaded eraser

Small plastic sandwich container (for palette)

Paper - mixed media pad

Tinted illustration board optional

Optional:

Paper towels

Blue painters tape

Spray bottle

I really like this artist for gouache tips:

Bio:

Ellen Langford is a painter whose body of work is inspired by landscapes, chance meetings, and the South’s mighty cross-currents. Ellen notices and captures the relationships between the land and its inhabitants – a child with his dog, a clothesline in the breeze, a figure with the landscape. We don’t only see them in her paintings, we feel that joyful connection.

Langford worked for years as a paramedic in central Mississippi. She became heavily influenced by the often tender narratives of her patients’ stories, as well as the quiet rituals that they incorporate into their lives. As the parent of a young boy herself, and owner of chickens and dogs, Ellen often incorporates children and animals into her compositions as she finds sweetness and vulnerability in their movements, as well as joy and adventure.

Native to Mississippi, Ellen has pursued academic studies in her craft in New York, San Francisco, DC, and Italy, among other places. However, her work took on its recognizable narrative quality when she returned to her home in the Deep South.

Langford’s painting process involves layers of paint, often sanded away and then glazed over, searching for shape and pattern, color, and texture, to build the story worlds her figures inhabit. (Bio courtesy of Betsy-Rose Weiss of the American Folk Art Gallery in Asheville, NC).

Host or Publisher Ellen Langford