One of the many art supply products I ordered from Jerry’s Artarama when the Australian dollar was high was a set of Lukas gouache. I bought it quite a few years ago but recently dug it out again while organising my art supply cupboard.
The set comes with 12 colours, shown below.
At about $25 for the set (20ml tubes), this gouache seemed very cheap compared to the Winsor & Newton gouache I had already used. The full range includes about 45 colours, but the colours in this little set are well-chosen, allowing the artist to mix any colour they wish. The Lukas gouache is highly pigmented and provides good, opaque coverage, even when used in only thin layers, but can also be thinned even more with water and used almost like ink.
The Lukas gouache has the texture of a medium-bodied acrylic and was pretty consistent across the tubes, unlike the Winsor & Newton Designers’ Gouache which I had a lot of issues with. They also didn’t have as much of a rough, scratchy texture when I ran my finger over the dried paint on paper as the SoHo Urban Artist Gouache (those admittedly are a much cheaper, more student-grade brand, though). Once it’s dry, you can glaze other layers over it without the underlayers lifting, which is an issue I occasionally had with the SoHo gouache.
Here’s a little painting I did with the Lukas gouache.
I can safely say that of all the brands of gouache I have tried, these are my favourite. In fact, I will admit that after using the Winsor & Newton gouache and the SoHo gouache, I was starting to think that gouache just wasn’t a medium I enjoyed, and had decided that once I reviewed the Lukas gouache, I would sell all gouache sets I owned and just keep using acrylics and watercolours. But the good pigment concentration, uniform consistency and a low price have made me reconsider, and I will definitely keep using the Lukas gouache.
artdragon86 