Smug Bastard

Had a little downtime after work today, so I decided to sit down and practice with Gouache a little bit. I've said this before, but I like to use foxes when testing out colouring stuff- they've got distinct areas of light, middling and dark colour of pretty high saturation, so it forces you to have some idea what you're doing to pull it off. When I started I planned on just doing a generic fox, but then I remembered that a certain smug asshole fox has been popular in the fandom lately...

So I decided to use this smug bastard for a little test. I've been thinking on getting a nice set of high quality gouache paints to start studying with, but I was afraid that they might end up going to waste if I could never get the hang of them, and pro-spec paints are not cheap. The kind of money you don't want to end up just tossing away. What I do have are some very low quality student gouache paints that are many years old, dried up and crusty and terrible, and in very few colours, just the primaries plus black and white.

I decided that if I could put out a painting with my shit gouache paints that I actually liked, and felt somewhat confident about what I was doing, then I could go and get some proper paints. I sat down for a while, and this is what came out. While it's far from perfect- the value range is particularly low for example- it told me what I needed to know. This gouache stuff has potential.

I'm off to go spend $150 bucks on paint. Wheeeee....