Last time, we learned about glazing with flat washes. In this chapter, Jeanne Dobie continues by showing how you can glaze with gradated washes. Similar to the last chapter, where flat washes and glazing were introduced at the same time, Dobie takes the opportunity to mostly explain how to do a gradient. This has nothing in particular to do with glazing, but okay.
This chapter felt… kind of easy to me? I often paint in multiple layers of wet-in-wet washes and gradients. While glazing flat washes felt like a pointlessly hard way to color-mix, I can easily understand the reason for of doing your gradients in different layers. It prevent thems from directly mixing too much, for example in yellow-to-blue sky gradients.
More notes on glazing
I’ll skip Dobie’s written instructions for how to do a gradient wash. In this chapter there are also additional notes on glazing.
Minimal number of layers
If you need more than three or four glazes to create a special atmopshere, take care. Your success of failure depends on keeping the ovelrays very transparent. The impact is lost without the transprency. Try to arrive at the desired color with only three or four applications… Keep the glazes light, transparent, and minimal in number.
Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 11 (p. 64)
This directly contrasts Don Rankin who claims to use up to 20 layers for a single painting. Perhaps Dobie is specifically speaking about the use of layers in the sky with the word “atmopsheric”. Still, it feels like they have opposite approaches.
Your glazes are supposed to be light, oops
If you are unsure about how deep your midtone should be to bridge the gap between your glazes and darks, pick up a brush or some other dark object and hold it up to your painting to discover how light your glaze really is.
Jeanne Dobie, Making Color Sing, ch. 11 (pp. 65-66)
Oh, it’s supposed to be light? This was definitely not conveyed earlier and I did not do this when glazing in the previous chapter, oops.
Dobie speaks as if obviously your glazes will end up super light, but I found it surprisingly difficult to keep them light last time, because I’m used to trying to make each wash pretty strong and juicy, and I forgot (or didn’t have the intuition built up to realize) that the final mix would wind up darker once multiple layers were stacked.
Advantages & disadvantages of glazing
Dobie lists these advantages of glazing:
- “The glazing method… organizes a painting strongly into simplified value areas.” She said this in chapter 10 as well. Then, as now, I found the opposite: glazing made it harder to control values, not easier.
- “It also reinforces other good watercolor habits. You learn, for instance, to leave an area alone, so that it doesn’t become overworked.” I also don’t see how glazing does this. If anything I feel like I end up overworking stuff more because I keep going over it.
- “You are also pushed into thinking of the whole painting as a unit, instead of getting entangled with the subject alone.” I guess? If you’re working like a process printer, you do have to think about the whole image at once: you divide it into color layers, so instead of saying “I’ll paint the entire tree, then I’ll paint the entire grass, etc.” I would say that only using glazing for your sky gradient enforces this less so. This is a reasonable point but I would have put it in the previous chapter.
- “There is no room for indecision. You can’t leave an area unresolved, to be completed later.” I mean, by definition you are leaving stuff to do layer when you work in layers, but I guess this is a continuation of the previous point: you have to at least plan the image completely before you begin.
And here is the one (1) disadvantage listed:
- “Glazing leaves crisp edges. It is thus not the best choice for describing subjects with softly blended edges, such as billowing clouds.”
Ahh, we found it, the point I most disagree with in the chapter! Crisp edges is a disadvantage of wet-on-dry; it has nothing to do with glazing at all! This entire chapter is, I thought, about how you can do glazes wet-on-wet, or at least with soft edges (as gradients are)! You can definitely glaze clouds!!! What are you talking about!!!!
Project
There is a step-by-step project, but more so than the others it is a tutorial of a specific painting. I don’t want to copy a specific painting, so instead I chose a reference photo of my own that I thought had some of the same attributes: gradients at both the top and bottom, and the possibility for multiple layers.
I did 4 layers:
- Yellow and a bit of pink wet-on-wet band in the middle
- Blue gradients top & bottom, & more pink
- Violet-gray cloud shadows
- Black silhouettes
Here it is with everything but the foreground.
Up until this point, every glaze has been wet-on-wet. Each time, I rewet the page entirely. I do consider it glazing because it would just not have come out the same if I hadn’t done it on different layers. Plus, I am taking into account the transparency to some degree: I paint the orange with pinker paints than desired because it’s on yellow, and paint the gray with bluer paints than desired because I know the orange will cancel it out.
Here’s the final product, with the wet-on-dry black silhouettes.
TBH, I prefer the process photo. I’m not really happy with the way the silhouettes came out; you can see that I lacked the boldness to do them in one layer, as I intended, so some parts are doubled-over. I also, as usual, used too large of a brush.
Conclusion
I’ll be honest that I really wasn’t thinking about the chapter lessons beyond the choice of reference. I painted this as I normally would, which happens to be with layers.
I usually try to do something different and inspired by the chapter to try to push my comfort zones and get a better understanding of what Dobie is saying, and often I succeed! But this time I could not figure out how to apply her advice in a practical way beyond “why not try doing some gradient glazes.” I don’t feel that I realized any of the benefits she indicated, though I also didn’t have the disadvantage: I did do billowing clouds, so there!
Leave a Reply