Mastering Glazing Techniques with Don Rankin, part 3: Understanding Neutrals

I previously covered chapter 1 and chapter 2 of this book. While attempting Jeanne Dobie’s chapter on glazing, I realized there’s still a lot more I need to learn, so, onto chapter 3! “Understanding Neutrals” explains how to use the glazing technique to mix complex, low-chroma “neutrals” (gray, brown, etc.)

As we’ve previously learned, glazing means indirectly mixing by layering different transparent colors on top of each other. We also know from our previous forays into mixing gray that you can mix neutral colors on the palette by combining two complementary colors or all three primary colors. So, too, you can mix low-chroma neutral colors with glazing, by layering two complementary or all three primaries on top of each other.

I really should have done this chapter before I did chapter 10 of Making Color Sing! That chapter also turned out to secretly be about glazing neutrals, though it was not obvious to me until after I finished the chapter and worked through the examples. Oh, well, live and learn.

Glazing Neutral Tips

Most of Rankin’s “Understanding Neutrals” chapter describes specific paintings he did with lots of neutrals. I’ve extracted what I think are the generalizable tips and ideas.

Color Palette

Although Rankin’s example paintings are all very neutral, the paints he used are bright on their own. A typical palette:

• New Gamboge or Indian Yellow
• Winsor Red (then Naphthol Red), sometimes mixed with Vermilion
• Winsor Blue (Phthalo Blue)
• Occasionally, small amounts of Cobalt Blue or Cerulean Blue in the final washes to cool things down or add shadows

Note that the color names he uses are pretty legacy. In my post on his palette, I suggested modern alternatives.

Order of glazes

Although the samples in previous chapters limited to three washes of yellow, then red, then blue, in practice Rankin does not appear to be dogmatic about which order he paints the layers in or how many he uses. Yellow is usually first, but sometimes after that he skips to blue to get in the darks and shadows, and sometimes he will successively warm and cool the scene slightly with reds and blues until he gets the effect he wants.

In a visual example toward the end, Rankin shows different swatches made from different order of layers and shows that if you carefully control the experiment and use the same strength of color in each one, the color will be pretty much the same, regardless of order. However, in everyday life, it’s a lot harder to control. The appearance of different orders seeming to make different colors is usually due to the fact that you are actually using different dilutions.

Strength of glazes

Rankin seems not to worry too much about doing “too many” layers. One of the paintings he describes as having twenty layers! In general, he seems to err on the side of keeping his layers very light so that each one only modifies the color of the scene a little bit. That allows him to make further adjustments in future layers. This is especially true of initial layers, which he sometimes describes as being almost imperceptible – used mainly to guide future layers.

I believe this is possible because he uses almost exclusively staining pigments. The few times he mentions using Cerulean Blue or other lifting pigments, it’s only in the final layer or two, for last adjustments.

Dark neutrals

In some cases Rankin starts with strong color in an area where he knows the final color will be dark. For example, for a scene which will feature dark brown, he begins with a layer of strong yellow in the areas that will be dark brown. In this way, it’s very much like the way a process printer would print the scene.

For very dark darks, he recommends using stronger mixed color toward the end of the painting. He describes making a very thick palette mix of all the primary colors for a dark black/brown, and using it for the darkest passages toward the end. Using a thick mix too early, he cautions, can make the painting too opaque and lose the luminous quality of glazing.

Chroma Contrast

By using neutrals for most of the painting, it’s possible to make bright colors really pop.

Painting on Location

Somehow, Rankin seems to use glazing when painting on location. Personally, I think this sounds too hard because you have to wait for each layer to dry, but I think the following tips can also be used when not-glazing.

• The first thing you should do is notice what you most want to capture in the painting, to give you a guiding principle of how you should go along.
• Next notice what you want to leave white/light, or a pure primary color. These will be areas you paint around (in all or some of your washes).
• Observe what color is in front of you, not what color you think it should be.
• If you’re painting fleeting light from life, it’s helpful to just do a quick study concentrating on color and value, not worry too much about undersketching and planning. You can use the study if you decide to do a more complex scene later. [Personally, I would also not worry about glazing in the quick study.]

Exercise

This is a self-imposed assignment based on a sample page shown in the beginning of the chapter, where he shows a sampling of neutrals mixed from his typical RYB primaries in different dilutions.

In my post on chapter 10 of Making Color Sing, I also did some experiments in using three-color glazes mixes using different pigments, and found them all ugly. They have been further criticized as looking like chromatic hallucinations, migraine aura, nightmare fuel, etc. FAIR!!

After reviewing these experiments and reading Rankin, it’s become clear that I tended to make these mixes too strong, with each layer pretty intense and difficult to walk back to a gentler neutral. After all, when you glaze, each layer is only about a third of the paint you will use. So, I thought I’d experiment with making lighter-valued glaze mixes.

This time, I also limited myself to Rankin-esque color choices: Isoindolinone Yellow (for legacy New Gamboge), Perylene Red (for legacy Winsor Red), and Phthalo Blue Red Shade (for legacy Winsor Blue).

These look better though now I find them mostly pale. The mid-valued ones are definitely uglier. Some of these are reasonable skin tones. They don’t really look or feel like my style.

Of course, this is not my usual palette. I decided to repeat the experiment with colors that I prefer. Below, I used Quin Rose for all rows; alternated Isoindolinone Yellow and Nickel Azo Yellow for the yellows; and used Phthalo Blue RS for the top two rows, and Indanthrone Blue for the bottom two rows.

Again, quite pale (and ugly when mid-valued), but in general I like these colors better. Many of them look more sky-like, that’s probably why! While I mostly don’t see what I would do with these glazes, I could see making skies that have that grayish violet or the blue-fading-to-yellow in the second row toward the right (PY150, PV19, PB15).

Conclusion

While the swatches give me some mild inspo for multicolored pastel skies, for the most part, I’m not finding that I like any of these glazed mixes. They are neither attractive nor neutral, exactly. I find myself wondering “Why can’t I just mix things the normal way?” Still, at least I’m moving off the nightmarish ones I got last time!