Case Study

A real oldie piece. Fun with textured gesso, and paint.

Done in gouache, with a touch of Polychromo pencil to sharpen it up, on gesso’ed board. The idea is to create a surface that has texture in it, let it dry, then work onto it.

Before I tried actual water-soluble gesso canvas primer to render onto, I’d also tried white emulsion paint! It actually worked quite well in terms of creating the brushed-bristley-textures, but if it had a sheen to it it wasn’t that easy to work onto. There wasn’t enough ‘tooth’ for the pencils and the water-bsed paint didn’t sit on it too well. Silly really. I mean: if the right materials are already available, just use them!

Like the mouth piece, I was experimenting with doing painted illustrations for the Newspapers—usually in Black & White. I had varying degrees of success with those though because their multi-tonal nature. Black pen was always fine for newspapers, but if you wanted to have greys in your image, you specified that they used a half-tone screen. Sometimes, not often, that wasn’t done and the results weren’t pretty. There was also a risk of the image looking a bit washed out and pale as it was printed in half-tone dots.

Illustrator: John White
Media: Gouache, Polychromo coloured pencils, on white Gesso-painted board