Gouache, an opaque water-soluble paint with gum arabic or acrylic as its binder, is one of the best-kept secrets in painting. Want flat, opaque areas of color? You’ll need only one coat with gouache. Want strong tones? Gouache has a high pigment load, ensuring saturated color. Gouache is perfect for illustration and design work because it dries quite quickly and is great for digital scanning because it is nonreflective. It’s excellent for plein air painting too, since it’s both portable and easy to clean up. Traditional gouache paints may be reactivated with water after they dry, but note that those made with acrylic binders cannot. All gouache paints work best on premium watercolor papers; because they are opaque, they also work well on colored papers. Browse our roundup of the best gouache paints to find the one that fits you best.

Brought to you by the oldest and most widely circulated art magazine in the world, ARTnews Recommends helps you make the choice that suits you best from products in hundreds of art and craft supply categories. Our offerings are based on intensive research, interviews with artists and craftspeople, and the accumulated experience of the site’s editors and writers. We provide trustworthy and helpful advice about materials to artists ranging from beginner to professional. 

ARTNEWS RECOMMENDS
M. Graham Artists’ Gouache
Developed for artists who are keen on customizing their own palettes and mixing their own colors, M. Graham’s gouache comes out on top. This line offers mostly pure, single-pigment colors (versus hues) made with a small amount of gum arabic as the binder, so they showcase an intense and impressive pigment load. The prime ingredient, however, is honey, which makes the paint moist and free-flowing. The sweet stuff also prevents cracking during the drying process and enables artists to rewet paints more easily than gouache without honey. This paint lays down smoothly, blends with ease, and can be thinned out to achieve light, translucent washes.

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Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache
Designers, illustrators, and artists reach for Winsor & Newton’s designer gouache paints to create flat areas of vibrant color. The paint’s opacity is achieved via premium pigments and not with chalks or fillers. The ultra-high and ultra-fine pigment load provides excellent saturated color coverage that dries matte, ideal for digital reproduction. These traditional gum arabic gouache paints reactivate easily with water. If opacity and transparency are both desired, these paints pair well with watercolor paints. Calligraphers, paper marblers, and airbrush artists also use these gouache paints because of their opacity and excellent flow—the formula literally glides from the tube. Winsor & Newton’s gouache paints are available in 89 alluring colors, but just two sets: a set of six primary colors and a set of ten introductory colors.

Q&A with Francisco echo Eraso, arts and access consultant.

How did you get involved in accessibility work?
I’m a disabled, trans, Colombian American artist, curator, arts administrator, and access consultant. I started my organizing work at the now disbanded Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn, where I learned how to approach accessibility in a grassroots context. I moved on to larger institutions such as the Ford Foundation, where I worked on a Disability Futures Fellowship. That experience, developing programs with 20 leaders of various disability arts and justice movements, is central to how I now understand contemporary access in the arts.

What are access services?
Institutions often approach access issues through the framework of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Many art spaces are working to meet a checklist of services now required by law, whether affecting exhibition design or programs for disabled workers. Recently, there has also been a lot of recommitment to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI), but all these efforts can still leave out many types of access that disability justice organizers foreground.

My own communities of disabled people concentrate on making space for being together. That includes access services like tours designed to meet specific disability needs, access work, care work, event coordinating, public programs, and virtual spaces. Access work should be locally centered, but also very expansive, community engaged, and led by disabled people.

What does your role entail?
Access work in the arts incorporates services such as consulting with installation teams and graphic designers to develop a universal exhibition design, which often includes tours in ASL for those who are Deaf and hard of hearing, and visual descriptions for those who are blind or have low vision.

On a street not far from Paris’s Centre Pompidou, there once was a sculpture that moved. It had a muscular man formed from gold leaf and bronze who, at various points of the day, would appear to fight a dragon, a crab, and a rooster, clanging as his arms and body swayed around. A clock nearby him announced the time.

Since 2003, the year that funding to maintain the piece dried up, its clock has been stopped, and the man has remained static. A quiet hush has since fallen over this sculpture by Jacques Monestier, titled Le Défenseur du temps (The Defender of Time).

All that has changed, however, thanks to artist Cyprien Gaillard.

For the past few years, Gaillard has been working to breathe new life into Monestier’s sculpture, which he has transported to Lafayette Anticipations for a moving show that also extends to the Palais de Tokyo. Once his exhibition ends, Gaillard will return Le Défenseur du temps to its former home, where it will once again creak and clang for unsuspecting passersby.

The curator of both shows, Lafayette Anticipations director Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, said in an interview with ARTnews, “When I invited him, he said, ‘Okay, I will basically make my work be material that’s consistent with the revival of an artwork by someone else. And I will dedicate all my budget to an outsider to public art that’s not loved anymore.’”

September 10 – October 29, 2022

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