Gouache Paint and Memories of Art Class

While I am (hopefully) wrapping up most of the paperwork of the past weeks, I am going through my art materials and experimenting with the old art materials I have lying around for years now.
Most of the time I prefer to work with acrylic paint because of all the layering that I can add on top of each layer of paint. But on the other hand I would like to work quicker and not having to deal with these big jars and palets with drying paint that is then unusable.

So I took out my tubes of gouache paint. While I was adding colours to my palet (one where they can dry and then hopefully be re-used by adding water again), memories of my schooldays immediately popped up in my head.
It was in this art class that I first used this kind of paint, the one that comes from tubes or pots. We learned to sketch, learned calligraphy with different pens, made posters and even learned to do hand lettering with this paint.

And I still remember that I always had a problem to add the right amount of water so that the paint would cover the white of the paper - the teacher would not approve of transparant paint in our work - but still be fluid enough to paint nice letters. Back in these days we had no computers to make our fonts, so we learned to draw them with pencil on paper with T-rulers and  set squares and then coloured them with paint. A very labour-intensive job, but I loved to lay down the colours and turning a plain white paper into a little piece of art.

In a small container I found some very old tubes of gouache and some newer ones. One of them was completely dried up. So with a sharp knife I cut through the metal of the tube and put the paint on the palet.
This way I can still use it (like a pan) and don't have to throw it away.

In a seperate small sketchbooks I painted swatches of all the colours that I have. While I had no reasons to add new colours while I was working with watercolours earlier this year ( see: How many colours do you need ), I think I need some new ones for gouache... I definitly need some extra red, purple, green and a light blue. Maybe even some grey? :-)

I am looking forward to try drawing over the paint with coloured pencils (mixing media as usual) and I might try to do some handlettering as well, something I learned from this teacher as well. Though I might want to try updating the look of these letters though... :-)