I need to acknowledge all the ongoing book and learning projects we have going right now:
- I started learning perspective. I plan to eventually come back to that, but I find it boring.
- Hanna is working her way through Wet-into-Wet Watercolor by Gail Speckmann (see part 1 and part 2).
- I am working my way through Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing.
Obviously it’s time to start another book!
Actually, the reason for this one is that I’ve reached a roadblock in Making Color Sing. The chapter I’m up to is about glazing, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. And I can’t skip it because the next few chapters build on it. So in order to eventually be able to continue, I decided to read a different book about glazing: Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor: How to Make Your Paintings Glow by Don Rankin (1986).
What is glazing?
In the introduction, Rankin explains that glazing (or “indirect” color mixing) is the process of painting in layers, generally with one color at a time.
Let’s say you want to mix a green. The direct approach is to mixing yellow and blue in your palette and then apply the mix to your paper. The indirect approach, glazing, you would apply yellow to the paper, and then after it dries, apply blue. Because watercolor is transparent, the result appears green even though the two colors were never mixed wet. Direct and indirect mixing give you different effects.
Working in layers
By definition, glazing involves working in layers, which means you already have to defy the instructions of the alla prima purists.
When I work in layers currently, I’m usually doing one of two things:
- Intensifying color and value. This happens when I intended to do my work in one layer, but it dried too pale, so I basically do the same thing over again on top, glazing the same colors over themselves.
- Switching from wet-on-wet to wet-on-dry. A common method for me is to paint the sky wet-on-wet. When it dries, I’ll paint a second wet-on-dry layer of landscape elements on top, usually with darker or and/more opaque pigments.
The glazing method taught in this book adds some additional tricks to the layering toolkit:
- Indirect color mixing, as explained above. Layering transparent color can create subtly different effects than direct color mixing.
- Modifying tone with a transparent wash. For example, you might paint an entire scene and then do a transparent golden wash over the whole thing to make it seem like golden hour or give it a nostalgic feel.
- Underpainting. This is the reverse where you might paint your entire page with a light (usually yellow) stain as a first layer, and then paint as normal on top of that as if on toned paper.
Exercises
In this post I’ll share my results from doing the exercises in chapter one, “The glazing technique.”
Exercise 1: Glazing color chart
Rankin’s exercise has you only do a few examples, but I saw this glazing color chart over on Louise de Masi’s blog, and so I tried it for myself (albeit messier).
I did the horizontal lines first, then, on a second layer, the vertical lines.
Exercise 2: Cumulative effect of transparent washes
Glaze colors over themselves to see how they darken in successive layers.
You can see that darker colors show more variation, while yellow sooner reaches a saturation point where you can no longer easily distinguish additional layers.
This is an easy exercise but it’s a good introduction to the paint point of working in layers: waiting for things to dry.
Exercise 3: Comparing order of layers
In this exercise, you paint the same object twice, using the same colors but layering them in a different order to compare your results. Rankin’s example is an apple so I also painted an apple, though I used a real model. Apples are something I have plenty of.
Layer 1
I painted two apples on the same page for comparison.
I started the one on the left with a wash of yellow. It’s almost uniform except the shine part of the apple is lighter.
I started the one on the right with blue shadow, preserving more white.
Layer 2
On the yellow-first apple, I added a light wash of red, which automatically makes it look more appley.
On the blue-first apple, I added yellow.
Layer 3
On the yellow-first apple, I deepened the red.
On the blue-first apple, I added the first layer of red.
I sprayed both of them with a misting spray to emulate the little pale dots on the apple skin.
Layer 4
On the yellow-first apple, I finally added the blue, which ended up being just a hint of blue shadow.
On the blue-first apple, I deepened the red.
Final Touches
I finished off by adding stems.
Reflections
The apple on the left, the one that started with yellow, remained yellower while the one one on the right, the one that started with blue, remained bluer. The yellower apple is closer to my vision / model. While the bluer apple still looks like an apple (a darker crimson apple like a macoun or an empire apple), it’s not the particular apple I was going for. (But it’s good to keep in mind that adding more blue, or underglazing in blue, is the way to get that darker crimson color, if I ever want to intentionally.)
Having done this exercise, it’s clearer to me why the order of layers matters. I think it has less to do with properties of the paint and more to do with the psychology of the painter.
In theory, I don’t think there is necessarily a major difference in mix color based on which component goes down first. I think if you used the same amount of yellow and the same amount of blue, you could get just about the same shades, whether you painted yellow-first or blue-first.
But in practice, you don’t use the same amounts. Choosing the order of layers is all about setting yourself up to understand how much of each color you will need.
When I did blue first, I used a lot of blue. In that first layer, I had to blindly guess how much blue I would eventually need, and I guessed wrong: I guessed too much. In the yellow-first apple, I actually ended up using barely any blue. By the time I got to blue, I’d had more of a chance to max out the dark values of the red. I also had bright, yellow-and-red areas I wanted to preserve.
Working light-to-dark gives you a better opportunity to modulate; you wait to use your dark colors until you see what lights/brights you want to protect.
Conclusion
The glazing technique isn’t so very different from ways that I have worked before, in that it builds on the general idea of working in layers. A major difference is that for each of these projects, I used only one color per layer. This definitely reduced the complication of what I was doing in each layer, but it made each painting take longer overall (they spent more time in “WIP” phases), and made it more important to have a long-term plan.
Leave a Reply