Mastering Glazing Techniques with Don Rankin, part 2: Working Methods

I previously covered the first chapter of Don Rankin’s Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor (1986). This time, I’ll work my way through the chapter titled “Working Methods.”

While Chapter 1 introduced the basic glazing toolkit, Chapter 2 puts the building blocks together to paint simple paintings that Rankin says will “give you an idea of my working methods.”

Exercises

Sea Mist

I copied this more or less directly from the book.

Let’s take it step by step.

Step 1 is simple enough: it’s just yellow, with more intensity in the upper sky. Rankin used his New Gamboge; I used a custom yellow mix of PY150 and PBr24.

In step 2, a light wash of red is added over the whole thing. I used Pyrrol Red (PR254).

In steps 3-4, you add the blue elements. I forgot to take a picture after step 3, which was the wet-on-wet fog and subtle waves. In step 4, the same colors at a darker value are used wet-on-dry to paint the boat.

Again, I used a custom mix, this time involving Phthalo Blue and Pyrrol Red.

Rankin offers little guidance on how to paint the boat; it just appears fully formed in one step. He simply says “Note that the boat is comprised only by a few shapes.” I guess, but how? Obviously his boat is better than mine.

This painting was not so very different from the way that I normally work in layers. Just as I have been taught to do, Rankin works light-to-dark and back-to-front (i.e. sky wash first, foreground elements last). The only difference is that he takes care to only use one color per layer. That doesn’t mean he uses only one tube color, or only one pigment – he mixes a specific mix on his palette, but he will then only use that one color for the layer.

Farm House

This scene, similar to the one on the cover of the book, uses a very similar process. I painted it while listening to an “American Hysteria” episode about the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, and remembering Stephen Gammell’s original terrifying art for the books, I can’t help but read the farmhouse as being eerie.

I only took a process picture of the first layer. Pretty much the same as painting #1, but with reversed polarity.

Again, the second layer was an even wash of Pyrrol Red, and the third layer was all the detail.

A more complex scene

The third project in the book is a more complex scene of a boat in a harbor, with a detailed underdrawing, and multi-color gradients done on different layers. I did not choose to copy this scene because the level of effort of copying the underdrawing outweighed my interest in painting another boat, but I decided to do a more complex scene in my style instead: a sky scene!

Here’s my reference photo.

As with the examples, I started with a yellow wet-on-wet layer, using only WN Naples Yellow Deep (PBr24). I left some areas white, especially where I intended to later put blue.

In step 2, once the yellow dried, I rewet the page and added a layer of pink: DV Quin Red (PR209).

In step 3, I added the blue. I used a mix of Phthalo Blue Red Shade and SH Cobalt Turquoise (PG50) to make a light sky blue. I also started taking notes in the blank area of the page on my colors.

Here is where I felt I really reaped the benefits of working in layers since the blue on its own layer doesn’t mix much with the other colors. It’s much easier to keep the soft shapes from running into each other, compared to alla prima.

I liked the sky at this point but I decided to see if adding some gray clouds, as in the reference, would make it even more lifelike. So I added a fourth layer, where I glazed mixed grays over the other colors. Because the grays are mixed from the other colors, they adapted well to being layered over.

And to finish off, I did a sloppy sort of silhouette layer as layer 5.

Concluding Lessons

Glazing is not so different from what I’m used to

In the “Methods of Working” chapter, I found the glazing technique in practice to be similar to previous layer-based ways of working that I have tried. Here are the methods that were familiar to me:

1. Working back-to-front – putting the background down first and then the foreground on another layer.
2. Working light-to-dark – starting with yellow, the lightest primary, for example.

Here’s what sets glazing apart:

1. One color per layer. The “one color” can be a tube-fresh color or a mix. Rankin often mixes colors on the palette, but then he will tend to use the resulting mix for an entire layer.
2. Indirect mixing from transparent layers. As I mentioned, this is not the only way of mixing colors allowed, but it’s used whenever possible. For example, an orange sky is painted via a layer of yellow and then a layer of red instead of with an orange paint or mix.

Drawbacks

I found that glazing had a few drawbacks over other methods, such as mixing on the page:

• Mentally fiddly. Indirect mixing requires planning ahead and doing some complicated mental color-mixing math. You basically need to turn yourself into a four-color process printer.
• Time-consuming. Painting in layers means a lot of sitting around waiting for your layers to dry. Each individual layer is pretty simple, though, so this can lend itself well to multitasking, e.g. working from home. Once you have your marching orders, you can quickly bang out a layer in between painting in between other tasks, and it’ll be dry by your next break. It’s more annoying if you want to devote a long period of time to painting, or you’re an exploratory, “discovery” painter.

Best use cases

Keeping the drawbacks in mind, here are some situations where I personally find glazing useful and worth the trouble:

• Deep, complex color, such as the apples in part 1.
• Lighter-colored backgrounds with darker-color foregrounds (e.g. silhouettes). It’s a lot easier to make a flowing, soft sky gradient or cloudscape on a single layer without negative-painting around foreground elements.
• Two-color gradients, especially blue-to-yellow in the sky. Glazed gradients, with each color on a different layer, tend to mix less in the middle than wet mixed-on-page mixes.
• Soft-edged bright colors surrounded by muted colors. In this situation, the muted colors can contain the bright color, so it’s possible to use indirect mixing. For example, in sunset clouds, you can simply paint the whole page with the brightest color (e.g. sunset cloud pink), and then use negative painting around it to apply the surrounding muted colors (e.g. shades of blue to make gray-purple clouds, together with the background pink). This is more effective than trying to get edges of different color mixes to join up exactly.

My preferred examples are very sky-focused, which may say more about me than about glazing per se. Rankin certainly seems to use glazing for numerous other subjects, such as a still lifes, figures, and houses.

Rankin’s specific interests and paintings are explored more in the remaining chapters of the book, but I think this is where I will leave off. The first two are the densest with how-to knowledge and explanation of the technique, and contain the most wisdom I felt I could apply to my own work.

While I don’t feel that glazing is always the most effective or fun technique – it’s too fiddly for me to use all the time – it’s certainly a useful tool to have in my toolkit, especially for situations with delicate color-mixing requirements.