The Painting Process

The following few images show the progress of a piece of work.  I use a very limited palette, yellow, blue and red, and white for tints.  I will draw some pencil guidelines, the tree trunks, some horizontal divisions in the land and water.  In this painting I started with the greens in the back.  I can manipulate the colour from spring green to earth green to blue green by changing the amount of each of the three primary colours as often as I wish.  Gouache does not get muddy.  The colour mixing is done in the palette.   I do not paint in washes or overlap darker over lighter colours, rather each area of colour is painted beside the next.  Sometimes I paint the background first, other times the foreground.  Sometimes I like to work from the lighter to the darker colours or I may do the opposite.   One thing I do consistently is paint in sections.