Free PDF: Easy Tips to Paint Landscapes with Gouache

Learn how to paint atmospheric, layered scenes with this cheat sheet for painting foreground, middle ground, and background

Combining and contrasting vibrant and bold colors with a dark matte finish, gouache is a great medium to create fantastical and atmospheric scenes.

Inspired by the natural world and fairytales, self-taught painter and author of Creative Gouache Ruth Wilshaw (@ruthwilshaw) uses the medium to create her layered landscapes. For her, the effect you can create using gouache techniques helps add elements of magic, whimsy, and adventure.

Here, Ruth shares a downloadable cheat sheet packed with advice for painting your background, middle ground, and foreground to create layered landscape paintings with depth using gouache.

Scroll to the bottom of the article to learn more about and download the free guide—but first, let’s explore the basics of working with gouache…

What is gouache?

Gouache is an opaque form of watercolor. As Ruth explains in her online course for painting atmospheric landscapes, “It holds the same ingredients as watercolor, but has much more pigment, so when you paint you get that nice opaque finish.”

Convenient to use, gouache is water-soluble (which means you can clean your tools with water alone), it dries quickly and you don’t need any special equipment to get started—just a basic watercolor sketchbook, brushes, and paints.

The opacity of gouache also means you can use it to craft all kinds of styles: you can paint more realistic textures and colors, combine a range of textures in one piece (for example, pairing bold, opaque layers with light watercolor-like washes), and you can also build up scenes in layers—which is particularly useful for landscapes.

Why is gouache good for landscape painting?

Thanks to its opacity, you can easily layer up your landscapes (adding both light colors over dark and dark over light) which helps add depth to the paintings. Plus, unlike other mediums including oils and acrylics, it dries quickly so you can make small changes as you work.

Free Cheat Sheet: Quick Tips for Painting Atmospheric Landscapes with Gouache

To help you create balanced layered landscapes with gouache, Ruth breaks down the painting process into three distinct stages to make each step more manageable:

1. Background (or first layer)
2. Middle Ground
3. Foreground

In this free resource, she shares her tips, notes, and reminders for painting at each stage, including advice for everything from what brushes to use, adding textures, considerations for colors and details, and more.

For example, when working on your first layer she recommends that you use paler or less saturated colors, as you’d expect to see in a reference photo. She also shares an example of how she uses grass to create space between the layers. To learn more, download the free resource below.

After clicking the download button, you’ll find a PDF titled, Free Cheat Sheet: Quick Tips for Painting Landscapes with Gouache, by Ruth Wilshaw, in the Downloads folder on your computer.

If you want to keep improving, you can sign up for Ruth Wilshaw’s course, Painting Atmospheric Landscapes with Gouache where she’ll teach you how to paint layered landscapes with a magical atmosphere using gouache paint.

Discover more resources to start painting in 2022

If this free cheat sheet for creating fantastical scenes with gouache has piqued your interest in painting, explore all of Domestika's online watercolor painting courses. And continue your creative journey by getting stuck into these resources...

- Discover the basics of watercolor art with the help of three practical painting guides for beginners.

- Learn how to bring your gouache illustrations to life with vibrant colors by making your own gouache color card.

- Ready to explore other mediums? Discover twelve online acrylic painting courses for beginners, covering landscapes, illustration, product design, and clothing.