Traditional art skills & Procreate - LOSE YOURSELF IN ILLUSTRATION

Audra Auclair shares why spontaneity and embracing big changes can not only be freeing, but also help to improve the final piece

- Audra Auclair

This workshop shows how I use gouache and the spontaneous madness that is my creative process. I’ve experimented with various mediums, hungry to try everything.

I love watercolour for its fluidity and quick drying times, but I’m not able to change a painting mid-way. Oil has incredible results with the smoothest blending, but it has longer dry times. Gouache checks every box for me. It can be watered down and used like watercolour, and the hybrid acrylic gouache gives extra coverage when I need to make big changes, which is important to me. I follow wherever the paint takes me; if it takes me in another direction part-way through the painting, I won’t resist.

This workshop will focus on conceptualising on the fly. To avoid muddying the colours, I use either watered-down gouache or watercolour for skin and base layers, which helps me out later because it’s easier to blend into this base layer.

Gouache is like a relationship: over time I’ve got to know and understand that certain paints will dry darker or lighter on paper than it looks straight out of the tube. Because of the variety of which the colours dry, it’s helped me to loosen up and see the beautiful variety in tones that gouache’s unpredictability may offer. Perhaps our unpredictability is what makes us a great pair…

1 Spend time conceptualising the artwork

I don’t often conceptualise much at the beginning of my pieces unless I’m working with a client. My initial sketches have more movement and interest when I allow myself to work on the fly. But because this piece is for a cover, I create a rough initial concept and then a rough sketch. This two-headed person has been in my mind for a while.