The Art of Not Mixing: Making Color Sing Chapter 10

It’s time for me to return to Making Color Sing by Jeanne Dobie, the book I am working through chapter by chapter. I left off on chapter 9 back in October, but I got stuck on chapter 10, about glazing, because I could not understand Dobie’s explanation of it. It’s not skippable, because the next several chapters build on the idea.

So, I turned to another book, Mastering Glazing Techniques by Don Rankin, where I learned what glazing is and practiced it. Can I understand this chapter now??

Kind of!

What is glazing?

In Mastering Glazing Techniques, I learned that glazing is the art of “indirect” color mixing across different layers by laying one transparent watercolor layer over another.

Dobie explains glazing in much the same way:

Glazing is a process of applying sheer layers of pure pigment, one over the other, to produce a desired color effect. It differs from a regular watercolor wash in that, in glazing, the colors are not mixed together but applied separately and allowed to dry between applications.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 10 (p. 58) [emphasis hers]

Dobie repeatedly emphasizes that glazing is “not mixing;” indeed, the name of this chapter is “The Art of Not Mixing.”

Tips

Dobie’s tips for glazing are, essentially, as follows (paraphrased and simplified):

• Use pre-stretched paper
• Tilt your board 15 degrees
• Use a wide flat brush
• Mix plenty of color ahead of time so you don’t run out
• Plan your whites
• Work across the page, top to bottom, catching the ‘bead’ with your next stroke, and being careful not to go over the same area twice.
• Rather than “paint around” the white shapes, use flat horizontal strokes and stop at the edges of the white shape, lifting any beads with a thirsty brush.

Hey… wait… these aren’t tips for glazing, they’re tips for doing a flat wash!

Personally, I don’t feel like glazing and flat washes are necessarily that related; you can do glazing with gradients and wet-on-wet layers! In fact, that’s basically all I’ve done before. For example, in the project below, I did a red-yellow wet-on-wet layer for the background, then the clouds on another layer, more blue-violet so they would come across as gray when the background shone through. Is this not also glazing?

Book Example

Dobie’s “step by step” example shows a yellow base layer with a white shape preserved, followed by a few thin layers of red and blue that slightly modify the yellow. She then skips to showing you the finished painting, which is suddenly quite a complex boat scene with a warm-gray sky looking nothing like the color from the previous step.

The skipped layers leave out what I find complex about glazing, which is deciding which color to put on each layer and how much and why.

It’s also clear from the layers shown that that she is doing more than she describes in the text. For example, the layer in the last shown step contains multiple colors, as well as wet-on-wet washes. All the text to this point has indicated that the glazing technique requires strictly one color per layer, and wet-on-dry only. She doesn’t explain how to know when to violate those guidelines.

She also doesn’t explain one of the planning problems I find most tricky about glazing: not only do you have to preserve those shapes you want to leave totally white, you also have to preserve any shapes you want to be purely another color. For example, if you want a blue sky, you should not underpaint the sky in yellow and red. This takes the mental work of ‘preserving your whites’ to another level: you have to preserve your whites, reds, blues, and purples in the yellow layer (anything without yellow). And so on.

Dobie mostly avoids this conundrum by showing us a painting which is mostly gray (an overcast day), so all three colors are present in different proportions in each layer. She does not, however, explain how to plan the proportions. The best she does is this:

Don’t despair if your first attempt results in too much color or too little color. Glazing requires several trials to develop an expertise in estimating how much pigment is needed. Eventually, with practice, you will be able to judge how much red, yellow, or blue is required to produce the desired effect.

Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing ch. 10, p. 62

So, basically, idk you figure it out.

Projects

There is no specific project or exercise defined, but I decided to try a couple of scenes in a glazing style. I kind of flailed because I wasn’t sure anymore what would count as glazing for the purpose of this chapter or which aspects to try, so you’ll have to bear me with as I make a few attempts.

Golden Hour Willow

For this scene, I challenged myself to push further out of my comfort zone by indirectly mixing colors that I ordinarily would mix on the palette or the page. I chose a scene with lots of green in order to mix it indirectly via yellow and then blue layers.

Considering the golden tone of the scene, I chose Quinacridone Gold as my yellow and put down yellow for the lawn, a little for the sky, and a blob for the large mass of leaves on the left.

For step two, I added Pyrrol Scarlet over basically all the same areas, along with some scumbling for the leaves on the right.

Okay, now Prussian Blue over basically the same areas, plus the more shadowy areas.

Woof… at this point I don’t feel like I’ve gotten green at all. Some areas look too blue, others look too red, and others look too yellow, and some all at the same time. It’s very strange and I don’t know how or what I should have done to change the balances back in previous layers. This is complicated!

Biding my time, I added a trunk (using a palette-mixed brown-black) and added some blue into the sky.

It is at least looking like something at this point, although I’m still unhappy with the colors. It’s just not green enough. To pull back some of the blue and red, I broke protocol and added another layer of a yellow on top: this time, I used Rich Green Gold (PY129), a very greenish yellow to punch up those greens.

Okay. It’s looking a lot greener now. And I’m also pleased with the way the blue-into-yellow has dried in the background.

But the values aren’t right. The dark areas aren’t dark enough. The original photo is backlit, with dark shadows and silhouettes. I caved and palette-mixed some dark blackish-green colors to add a layer of shadows and details.

And here is where I’ll leave it. This is definitely a different approach than I would have ordinarily used for this reference. I almost wish I’d copied a scene I already did in another style so I could compare it. Some distinctive things about the glazing process that I like is that you can see bits of orange and gold and blue at the edges of the leaves, which contributes to the effect of sun glow. But, there is also an overall feeling of busy-ness that I don’t like; though this could just be from user error rather than the style itself.

Glazed Flat Wash Gray Sky

Finally, I decided to try a scene more similar to Dobie’s example: a gray sky made from successive flat washes of yellow, red, and blue. I chose this reference photo as a scene where the sky was mostly flat but seemed like it would benefit from interesting grays.

I guess I need to forgive Dobie for not photographing every stage of her painting, because I also forgot to do so here. So, let’s just skip to the final product.

I painted the sky with successive washes of MANS, Quinacridone Rose, and a palette mix of Cobalt Blue and Phthalo Blue GS. I left the lower left corner blue-free for the grass, and the lower right lighter in value for the snow. I then painted all the details (trees, grasses, shadows, etc.) using palette-mixed colors, mostly TRO and Indanthrone Blue.

I felt during this process that I really had no idea how much yellow, rose, and blue to put in each layer and that the end layer felt too blue. Still, the multi-layer gray is more interesting than a palette-mixed gray would have been. The overall effect is gray, but there is something uncanny about it. In the texture of the paper, you can see flashes of more blue or more pink color (or more yellow, especially in the upper right corner where I mistakenly allowed some to pool).

Exercise

After doing the project, I now realize that a good “exercise” for this chapter would have been to practice making square of flat washed gray from three successive layers of yellow, red, and blue, varying the specific yellows, reds, and blues used, as well as the proportions, to see what effect it would have on the gray.

So, I tried it.

Here’s a bunch of glazed combos of yellows, reds, and blues. I used a bunch of yellows (from left: MANS, Naples Yellow Deep, PY151, PY110, PY150), two reds (Quin Magenta, top two rows; Pyrrol Scarlet, bottom two rows) and two blues (Phthalo Blue GS, rows 1 and 3; Cobalt Blue, rows 2 and 4). Because I was not consistent with the amount of each, and some are stronger than others, some of them ended up looking more yellow, blue, or pink/red.

Across the board, though, I find these ugly as heck.

Here’s another experiment where I tried the same three colors (MANS, Quin Magenta, and Cobalt Blue), in different proportions.

The “all light” version is the only one I like; I guess this is how I was supposed to be glazing this atmospheric complex sky idea, with a very light hand on all the colors.

Conclusion: What is glazing good for?

Dobie’s Take

In the chapter, Dobie lists the following benefits of glazing:

• More “control over [your] washes.” Dobie says that in glazing, you are less likely to “lose your whites” as opposed wet-on-wet. So, again we see that she is setting up glazing in opposition to wet-on-wet. I think this is actually a benefit of wet on dry, not a benefit of glazing.
• Less “stage fright”; you immediately cover the page with a wash so there’s less time staring at a scary blank white page. I also disagree with this one. I think what reduces stage fright is knowing what you want to paint and how to go about it. Dobie may find glazing a methodical and intuitive technique because she knows it well, but I don’t, so no help there. It also doesn’t help you figure out what you want to paint.
• “Automatically simplifies a painting into a value pattern.” This is not explained, so I don’t really understand it, but I can’t say that I found there was anything “automatic” about getting the values right in glazing. Actually, I found values harder than normal. Each layer is only a part of the color mix, not the whole thing, and the darkest color (blue) is put on toward the end, so I found the values quite difficult to plan effectively. I think values are easiest when you put in the darks first.
• Luminous, interesting grays. Dobie says that glazing is a “natural choice for capturing the subtle nuances of an overcast day” because glazed grays can be lively. Now, this I did find glazed neutrals to be interesting and different from palette-mixed neutrals. In retrospect, this is the sleeper main point of the chapter.

My Take

Although I didn’t find that I reaped most of the benefits Dobie lists, I found others! From my experiments in this chapter, here is what I think glazing is good for:

• Situations where you want a complex low-chroma mix that kind of looks like all the component colors at the same time, instead of a flat, uniform hue. This is the “luminous, interesting overcast sky” example. My best advice for this situation is to keep a light hand on all the colors.
• Situations where you want to modulate the amount two colors mix, especially useful for blue-into-yellow sky gradients. When it came to foliage, I was disappointed with the way the yellow and blue on different layers failed to mix bold greens, but when it came to the sky, it was delightful.
• Situations when you want a little bit of the component colors to peep out at the edges of a shape, as in a backlit subject. I chose the backlit willow randomly, but it turned out to be a good choice for that reason.

Rating

The chapters really exemplifies my struggle with whether or not I think this is a good book to learn from. On the one hand:

• I found this chapter so confusing on the first read that I turned to another book to understand the technique.
• Dobie often gives garbled information that mixes up multiple concepts, such as the conflation of glazing with wet-on-dry flat washes in this chapter.
• The pictorial examples are often lacking in key details that would make them useful; for example, in this example, she spends a lot of time on initial washes but then skips all the steps that make the scene look like the final painting.
• I still didn’t feel like I understood what the point of this chapter was until I did the assignments.
• Oh, the assignments? I designed and assigned them to myself, because there aren’t any in the book. I took a couple of runs at assigning myself projects inspired by the text and examples in the book until I backed into what I think the point was. I feel like I am meeting Dobie more than halfway and putting a ton of work into understanding this book. I’m really not sure how much I’m getting something out of the book as I’m putting something into the book.

On the other hand, I did learn from these assignments! It’s not work I would have done, or done in the same way, without my honest attempt to explore the lessons from the book. I’m not sure the multilayer mixes is something I’ll do often, but it’s nice to have another tool in the toolkit.

So I guess, uhhh, C-?

Key Useful Ideas

• Glazing is an option for indirect color mixing that looks different from mixes made on the palette or the page. Try layering all three primaries for a complex gray in an overcast sky.