Welcome to
The Painting Lesson
by Linda Carson
big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com
Glazing
To glaze is to apply paint in brushstrokes so thin they're see-through. Glazing is a method of building up colour in translucent layers that mix optically with the underlying colours. Picture painting with coloured cellophane.
Glazing is most effective with paint media and pigments that can truly be transparent: oil paints glaze well, but egg tempera doesn't; alizarin crimson glazes well, but cadmium red doesn't.
Glazing emerged as an important technique with the invention of oil paints in the Renaissance. Here was something oils could do that the reigning easel painting medium, egg tempera, could not. Many artists actually used glazing as a cross-over technique: they prepared most of the painting in familiar (and fast) egg tempera, then applied glazes of that newfangled oil paint over the tempera underpainting.
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For example: The spheres above were painted in layers. The foundation layer is a plain circle in an even coat of pale yellow. The shading was built up in thin successive layers, or glazes, of burgundy. |
I have a hard time persuading my students that painting exclusively in glazes is anything but time-consuming. However, glazing is also a great technique for getting out of trouble. You can fine-tune colours with glazing and scumbling: lighter, darker, duller, brighter, more green or less mauve. This might be the best application for the new alkyd paints. Finally, an oil glaze that dries overnight.
If you want to get technical, you can also apply opaque paints in thin layers, but the result is more of a broken colour than a transparent layer, and it's usually called scumbling instead of glazing. The truth is that the two techniques are regularly used together and painters don't worry about whether they're "glazing" or "scumbling" from one minute to the next.
Back to the main lesson?Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002
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