Since I’ve been doing a deep dive on glazing through my explorations of Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing chapters on glazing (10, 11) and Don Rankin’s Mastering Glazing Techniques (parts 1, 2, 3), I was curious about other artists’ perspectives on glazed vs mixed colors. I found this 2020 post & video by Sarah Burns in which she compares the same two-color mixes, glazed and mixed on the palette. I decided to try the same exercise!
Greens
Like Sarah, I was curious how greens vary between glazing and straightforward mixing. The left chart is glazing; the right chart is mixing.
Each chart has three yellow rows (PY151, PY150, PY65) and four blue-to-green columns (PB28, PB15:3, PG50, PG7). I used the yellow as the bottom layer for the glazing chart.
My impressions:
- The Cobalt Blue and Cobalt Turquoise columns show more visible texture using the glazing method.
- The orange-yellow PY65 is quite ugly IMO as an underpainted color the glazed section. It makes better greens in straightforward mixing.
- In Sarah’s charts I consistently found the glazed side better, but I think that is because she got deeper color in two layers; the single-layer side always looked a bit pale. I made an effort to equalize the value by keeping the glazed layers fairly diluted and the mixed layers fairly strong.
Oranges & Violets
This time I thought I’d compare some mixes using pinks as a base color instead of yellows.
Here, the rows are PB209, PV19 (rose), and PR122. The columns are PY150, PO71, PB28, and PB15:3. Pink is the bottom color for the glazing.
Again both sets are good, but with different strengths.
Glazing shows the “color separation effect” better, especially with the violets, even when using non-granulating Phthalo Blue GS. I can see using this for sky effects where you want complex colors that are neither wholly pink nor wholly purple; or clouds which are that sort of coral that’s not quite orange and not quite pink.
The palette-mixed violets also look more deeply “violet-y” and uniform rather than splotchy.
Conclusion
General differences between glazed and palette-mixed color mixes:
- Granulation is more evident in glazed, rather than mixed combinations.
- Even the non-granulating colors show some level of hue variation in glazing – sort of “both colors at the same time.” Mixed colors look more uniform.
- Both methods of mixing are capable of making strong colors, but in mixing it’s more important to include plenty of paint in the mix, while in glazing it’s more important to keep each layer at a moderate strength to avoid the total mix being too dark.
- Palette-mixing has a tendency to look fresher because you can see the white of the page more clearly through one layer, which I prefer at times.
- You get different effects from each method, but neither is inherently always better or worse. I could see myself wanting either method.