The Irodori gouache sets from Holbein are a good deal, they have different themes and different colors. I like this spring-themed one because it has brighter colors than most!

Something I’ve never liked about certain paint sets is how primary the colors can be. There’s nothing wrong with primary colors, they’re our fundamentals, yet every artist deserves a couple wildcard colors. The greens and blues in this set impressed me in that regard - they’re just a bit more sophisticated than typical thalo-type greens that show up in sets. Plus, getting a peach/pink color is a nice bonus, and the metallic gray is just fun! Metallics are especially fun to play with if you’ve never tried one before.

There are other Holbein Irodori gouache sets you can get, all corresponding with seasons - Winter, Fall, and Summer. Spring is my personal favorite and it matches the season so well. I’d say Winter is my least favorite group of colors, but there’s nothing wrong with darker colors in gouache. The Summer Iridori set is likely the closest to most traditional primary-color sets. The yellows and reds are all pretty standard, but there are a couple blues and greens to choose from, which give the Summer set some diversity.

Overall I recommend this brand of gouache and this set - it’s a nice amount of colors and a nice range of colors too.

What’s great about gouache overall is that you can rewet it and rework it once it is dry, making it a good medium for plein air or painting outdoors and on the fly.

^ here I am painting with the Irodori Spring edition near Wonderland Lake in Boulder. I ran out of space in my easel so I used the lid of the box as a bit of a palette! Worked well!

Most of all I love the bright green color in this set, which is called Byakuroku or Pale Patina. I may have seen this color before at Guiry’s but I haven’t thought to pick it up. This color is the color of the deer on the left in the painting above.

All in all this is a fun set! If you’re looking for gouache colors that have a theme and a fun variation, the Iridori sets are a good mix and a good amount of paints.

I started working in gouache, a medium which, for as long as I can remember, had been trash-talked as “impossible” “weird” and “annoying” by peers throughout my art career - so I had stayed away from it. Wow that was dumb! Never listen to the haters. Paint with gouache.

More importantly, I’d say paint with Holbein gouache because it is the best.

Sometimes I need a lot of ramp-up time and practice with a new medium before I use it for production-level images or comissions. So, when I started testing gouache in the images below, I wasn’t aiming to make any kind of super realistic drawing, and just wanted to test the colors out and make simple swatches to see what happened. I was blown away.

The colors here are just … to die for. I have never seen any other kind of paint do this. For this kind of luscious vibrancy, a close second might be color inks or alcohol inks, but they aren’t as opaque or as capable of coverage as this medium.

After seeing this, it might be hard for me to go back to oil paints.

The paper in the image above is Legion Stonehenge Aqua Hotpress.

I picked up a couple different sets of gouache, the 5 color set, which comes with a handy graphic on color mixing.

holbein artists gouache primary color mixing set box.jpg

holbein artists gouache primary color mixing set.jpg

I also picked up the 10 color travel set, and took gouache with me to the Bahamas lately, it was easy and fun to travel with these super small (.5 oz) set of Holbein tubes.

To take gouache with me on my travels, I downloaded the 4 pages of documentation from the Holbein website just in case - 4 pages to travel is much more even than an emotional support animal, but I didn’t want to have to jettison any of my paint. Security let me through with no questions asked, but I just didn’t want to risk it, and I would never advise anyone to travel with paint without having documentation that the paint is safe for air travel.

It's an AMAZING travel medium because it dries quickly and you don't need to set up a miniature chemical lab (cough cough oil paint!) in order to get it to look good.

While painting on the mall in Washington DC, I remember finishing an oil painting and screwing it into a painting carrier, then taking the metro to Five Guys and sitting around eating french fries while I was worried that fellow Five Guys customers and little kids might knock my painting over, or that someone might drop peanut shells on it. I’ll never have that issue with gouache.

In addition to the sets, over a few weeks, I bought a couple stand-alone colors which seemed impossible to mix from either set. These were admittedly a bit expensive so I did not take them with me on my travels. Even though they are low in ounces, the idea of having to jettison one of these at security made me wince.

Each larger, nonset tube is anywhere from 18 - 22 dollars, or higher, which puts them at the level of watercolors. Small and mighty, tiny and precious.

I have yet to make anything that is, well, anything with gouache, I’ve just been making swatches, which is very relaxing.

Probably the most interesting surface for goauche so far has been Yupo paper, which ends up surfacing this filmic quality:

The above is gouache on opaque, solid yupo.

Below, gouache on translucent yupo:

holbein gouache on translucent yupo paper.png

holbein gouache translucent yupo paper pink.png

No filter was used on the photos above. The colors are just endlessly pretty and true, eyemeltingly vibrant, and pure. The pigment in these Holbein paints is very, very strong.

So that’s my first run at Gouache testing and getting gouache going in my studio!

I hope to have more blogs and info and tests on gouache in the coming weeks. Overall if you’ve never tried gouache or have ever heard that it is too ‘difficult,’ I couldn’t recommend it more, especially with Holbien gouache and yupo paper.

Related blogs:

Bahamas Trip 2020

Medium Moment: Ink on Mylar

Medium Moment: Oil Paint on Yupo Paper