I’ve been practicing painting grass in gouache now. In watercolor, you have to paint negatively around the grass blades, unless you use an opaque paint somewhere in your process (like gouache), but with gouache, you can go back and forth between negative painting and directly painting the grass blades.

It did take some refinement of my process, but I think I’ve found a good one for grass.

Here, I start out with a relatively loose painting. Then, I patiently paint the blades of grass.

I don’t paint every blade of grass, but I need to put them on the edges of things. Whether it’s at the edge of the hill itself or where light and dark meet within the grass.

I needed some extra practice, so I painted a much smaller area of grass on the bottom right.

Here, I tried to take what I learned in painting the larger hill and refine it. Mostly, it was painting the grasses in order. Ideally you should start from the back and come forward. That makes it easier to paint the blades that should go in front over things that should be behind.