Gouache Tutorial mini Altar de Muertos for Day of the Dead

Wishing everyone a Festive Day of the Dead 2022! Apologies for my late painting and tutorial. I have been sanitizing, cleaning and reorganizing my entire house which is taking up almost all of my time. Today I decided to take a break from cleaning so I have time to work on artwork and uploads.

Here is a tutorial of the painting I did for Day of the Dead or Día de los Muertos. The video is longer than usual because the actual painting took me around an hour and a half to finish. My explanation is somewhat rushed in the video since I shortened it by a lot.

I started off with a white underpainting under all main objects : three candles, sugar skull, pan de muerto. Then I painted some cream and white coats on the candle before moving onto the sugar skull. I painted another layer of white and then added some colorful frosting, and lights and shadows, then moved back to the candles.

When I went back to the candles I had found a video on youtube of three candles that had three candles in this exact position (see video here https://youtu.be/tcQQbd_vIfc ) And since it was very orange and warm I repainted the candles accordingly. I was getting a little frustrated over the paint texture so I adjusted my painting to be a modified version of the source video. I painted on alternating layers of yellow cream, orange cream, orange, and warm gray shadow. I did not make this as dark as the source video because that would change the lighting of the other elements.
Candle flames are two layers of creamy orange, on layer of creamy yellow, an orange rim and white center. I added the orange rim so that it would not blend in with the candle body.

When I went back to the sugar skull I put another layer paint on some of the frosting to make it brighter and then added more light and shadow before painting in crinkled candy wrapper in the eye sockets because of the source photos I saw looked like there was candy stuffed in the sugar skulls.

The bread was painted from a mix of the light and medium brown tones in my jelly gouache palette with a creamy yellow highlight on the topping and a dark brown shadow on the underside of the frosting and bread.

The marigolds are orange and yellow blobs that were layered with creamy yellow or creamy orange and then highlighted with creamy yellow for the orange marigolds and white for the yellow marigolds.

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