Painting an Airliner in Gouache—an hour before boarding

0:00 I'm sitting at the gate waiting for my flight and i want to paint a portrait of the airplane that's going to take me from San Francisco to Newark. It's got a sort of a circular or elliptical fuselage from this angle. I'll draw it almost like an egg shape using a watercolor pencil. What i'm doing now is just laying it in quickly to get the basic placement on the page. This is a watercolor sketchbook and I'll be using gouache. Once i have a few key lines i look to make sure that the measurements are right.

0:46 So i measure the width of the fuselage as a standard unit of measurement measure that out to the edge of the jet and see if the vertical measurement is a little taller, and it is. The paints I'm using are yellow ochre, transparent red oxide, pyrrole red, Prussian blue and titanium white. The colors are both gouache and watercolor. I'll be mixing the two of them it doesn't matter if you mix watercolor and gouache. B y adding white they become opaque

1:32 Now what i want to do is lay a light, fairly neutral tone across the whole surface, but i want to leave two areas two highlights which are brighter than the white of the painted fuselage. Those highlights are on the top of the fuselage above the windows and then on the nose so everything else besides those little areas will get painted with this light wash, which i call a "ghost wash." it's made of a combination of red yellow and blue

2:25 you can see those highlights how bright they are i carry just a warm tone down to the foreground area of the picture and now i want to mix a darker value for the shadow side of the jet way and then the bottom side of the fuselage is a little darker i'm using a big flat synthetic

3:14 brush here and after having laid down this tone i can come in while it's wet and soften the edge the colors are relatively neutral on this scene mainly a study in grays here's the cast shadow it's fairly dark because the relationship between light and shadow in a scene like this is pretty dramatic and i want to emphasize that by making the areas that are lit lighter than they appear and the areas in shadow darker than they allen appear allen are you in the boarding area

4:24 i have a good hour or so to work on this i'm painting the area inside the pilot's windows with gouache you can build up some of the trim lines like these dividers just paint the window all the way across and then divide it with gouache now i want to paint some lighter tones in the sky kind of repaint the sky with a more definite tint of prussian blue

5:20 the sky is a light blue that gradates to a slightly lighter value closer to the horizon well i better finish this up because they're going to call the board soon luckily i'm not in the first group if you're traveling with any stroller car seat or wheelchair we need to get check times yes here before boarding our flight for newark a very full flight so gouache is a really great medium for quick captures in indoor settings where you could never bring oil paints it's fast it's direct it dries quickly and you can take it just about anywhere

6:07 i've got links in the description for tutorials and materials and more information about how to get the gouache you need and some techniques you can try yourself and again just a few reminders for a new mark we will be boarding according to the group numbers printed in your boarding pass kind of approach the boarding area okay thanks for watching you might want to check out my website or subscribe to my channel and then here's a playlist with more good stuff and a video that continues the story so check them out and share with your friends you