Still practicing in gouache. I felt the need to practice my skills with blending the paint.

Sphere

I decided to practice blending with a sphere to start. Spheres are likely one of the first things you learn to shade no matter where you learn drawing or painting from. With the sphere, I found using flats was the best way to go when blending. I believe that broad areas of value were best blended with a broad brush.

I practiced blending by placing the damp brush between the borders of two values and stroking parallel between them. Sometimes, when I’d need a more seamless blend, I’d use short X strokes then blend along the sphere’s contour.

Cherry

The cherry was next, and it gave me a little bit of a problem.

I tried blending with the flats and muddied the paint. I corrected the colors, and this time, I used a different approach – I used my rounds.

With round brushes, the way you blend is by taking the very tip of the brush and pulling and pushing paint around. Yes, it’s tedious, since you’re working with a very narrow, small area. But if you play your cards right, you can get a very smooth surface. You overlap your strokes, making sure there’s no space between them. Hopefully, when it’s all done, even if there’s still some brush marks in the paint, they’ll be so small you can’t even see them from the proper viewing distance.

As always, I need to rewet the paint and reactivate it. Then, with the tip of the round brush, I blend. To really get a seamless blend, you blend across the border of two colors, not necessarily along that border. This will eliminate the border, creating a seamless gradient between the two colors.

Blending with the round brush is something I mostly see oil painters do. I’m happy to see I can do it with gouache a little bit.