My daughter and I sat outside on the deck earlier this week trying out gouache paints on black mixed media paper. I made all of these in about 40 minutes—with plenty of under-the-breath cussing, if I’m honest.
Gouache drives me nuts. It doesn’t blend like watercolors. It hides the layers underneath and just feels opaque, stubborn and so unfamiliar.
But sitting next to my daughter helped. She was new to gouache too, yet she kept going. When I got so frustrated that I painted the entire black sheet blue, she looked over and said, “Oh! I didn’t know you could do that. What a great idea to make a metallic background, Mama!”
So of course I said, “Oh yeah, I meant to do that,” and painted another token a metallic green—just to keep the bit going. “You’re so cool!” she said. And that’s when I confessed. Dropped the farce. Told the truth: this wasn’t brilliance, just frustration made visible.
Her response: “Well, I think it’s still cool that you didn’t just throw the paper away.”
This child.
Later, I met with someone from the backyard gatherings and showed her these in person. She didn’t realize it was my first time layering gouache on black paper. She thought I’d done it before. And it was surprisingly validating.
It reminded me how harshly we critique our own work, especially when we feel clumsy or new.
So here’s my encouragement: play with wild abandon. Get frustrated. Keep going anyway. And share what comes out of it. Because at the end of the day, you’ll have made something out of nothing—and that matters.
If you’ve had a similar experience with a medium you’re not comfortable with, I’d love to hear about it. Works in progress welcome too.
