Ruth Wilshaw’s Domestika Course: Painting Atmospheric Landscapes with Gouache
At the end of last year a few courses on Domestika looked exciting so I thought I’d give them a go and I must say I’ve been loving Domestika’s format. They are well-curated, well put-together, and each course that I’ve done has gone through a very similar format, which I like. They’ve had quite good sales lately so I’ve jumped in to a few courses.
Ruth Wilshaw’s Course
The course I am writing about today is Ruth Wilshaw’s Painting Atmospheric Landscapes with Gouache. I have been slowly going through the lessons over the holidays and the start of the year, finishing all the modules about two weeks ago.
It has been so much fun, and very informative.
Why I wanted to do this course
I’ve dabbled in gouache on and off since 2020. In that process, I’ve read some books and done some Skillshare classes and YouTube tutorials but this was appealing and different for two reasons:
It focuses on landscapes - a subject matter that has not been my strong-suit and is something I am really looking at practicing at the moment
It was a chance to have fun and explore gouache without the goal of strict realism
The whimsical, wonderful aesthetic of Ruth’s illustrations, which have a fairytale-like quality to them also really appealed to me.
I was not disappointed.
What the course covers
The course covers:
Gouache and its characteristics
How to work with gouache and finding the right consistency for what you’re trying to do
Layering
Blending techniques
Landscape basics
Finding inspiration
Creating a plan for your paintings
Painting a Magical Waterfall exercise using the skills learned
Inspiration and ideas for how to move forward and keep improving.
As you can see, the course covers quite a lot, and definitely covers the basics.
Here are some of my exercises from the course:
What I loved
What I particularly loved were some of the layering and blending techniques I have been able to apply to my own work.
More specifically, the course also taught me great new skills like how to approach skies and water in gouache, both of which I was struggling with. I really loved and felt a great sense of accomplishment from completing the waters.
Another excellent aspect of the course was the resources and worksheets, especially the one on composition.
What I have gotten out of it
The course has given me the push to really give gouache my time and effort. It is a medium I fall in love with every time I use it but I haven’t used it often enough.
I loved every bit of the course, and was often squealing in delight when something worked well.
This is one of the last exercises in the course before you work on your own final piece.
Before the course I had mostly painted some animals and plants in gouache, with I think just one landscape. The course has given me the tools and resources to create whimsical, fun, vibrant illustrations from the photographs and memories of places I love.
This is something I was inspired to create from a photograph from Palm Valley, NT over a piece of sky practice. It looked to good to leave plain.
What I’m creating as a result of the course
The course has had me painting landscapes from my recent travels in a very illustrative, children’s book style.
Here are just a couple of the illustrations I’ve done since the course:
This was the first piece I created using the lessons learnt - my final project for the course. It is stylised view from a viewpoint on the Kalarranga Walk, Finke Gorge National Park, NT.
This is a section of Uluru, near the Mutitjulu waterhole. I started with muted colours and just liked how it looked so kept going with them.
The illustrations I’ve done lately are more along the lines of the sort of thing I love to see and pore over in picture books.
I don’t think there’s a course I’ve enjoyed more than this one in a long, long time.
