My New Favorite Paint - Gouache!

I've been working with watercolor for a couple of years now and loved the transparency of laying down layers and layers of color.

So, I was never that excited by trying an opaque paint because I thought it would be more like "coloring in the lines" rather than mixing on the page.  But my sister-in-law told me she loved working with this paint so I thought I would order a start set and experiment for myself.

This is the first thing I painted-- just threw paint on watercolor paper to see what would happen and I had three major surprises.  When watered down a bit, the paints became transparent!  AND, they mixed beautifully on the page.  But the best thing of all, the paints stayed vibrant and didn't become lighter like watercolors do.  

I'm excited to start experiments with other surfaces to see how these paints are different than watercolor and how I can use both paints at the same time to achieve different affects.

Geesh.  Now I have to buy a whole lot more gouache tubes to fill out my palette.  What a terrible problem to have!  (Off to the paint store!!!)