Glazing in Practice: Making Color Sing, Chapters 13-14

I’m working my way through Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing. The last several chapters have been about glazing (see: chapters ten, eleven, twelve). Surprise, surprise: chapters 13 and 14 are, too! I’ve combined them because they are similar. The main idea for both chapters is pretty simple: if you get to the end of your painting and you don’t like how the colors turned out, you can still alter them by glazing.

Chapter 13: Error into Asset

Chapter 13 focuses on fixing color problems with glazing. Glazing can:

• Dull too-bright colors
• Darken too-pale colors
• Improve harmony of too-dissimilar colors

Dobie spends most of the chapter walking you through an exercise, which I will show in the ‘Exercise’ section below.

Chapter 14: Ordinary into Extraordinary

Chapter 14 is basically the same idea: you can transform a painting by using a glaze as a final step. The difference is qualitative: while chapter 13 focuses on correcting errors, chapter 14 focuses on taking a pretty-good “finished” painting and adding that extra oomph.

Some specific ideas she offers include (paraphrased by me):

• Unify a painting that is too busy.
• Leave the area of interest alone, but glaze around it to tone down the surrounding area.
• Reduce the number of highlights/areas of interest by glazing over some of them, causing a few special ones to stand out more.
• Increase temperature contrast by making a neutral area warmer or cooler.
• Increase illusion of depth by making distant areas bluer.

Dobie shows an example in this chapter, which is meant to be the same painting side-by-side transformed by a single glaze of light ultramarine which adds shadow to the lower area. It’s a great idea to show something like this, and it’s what I felt was missing in the previous chapter. Unfortunately, in my copy of the book at least, the two images were painted with such vastly different color correction that it looks like the entire painting is different one using a totally different color palette. I only know it’s the same painting because all the shapes are exactly the same. It’s impossible to compare the effect of the glaze because it’s absorbed by the much larger effect of the printing differences.

Exercise

In chapter 13, Dobie has you paint a row of very bright color blocks, then glaze them with complements to see how you can “tame” bright color with glazing. I more or less followed the exercise as written, but I tried two glaze options for each color block. The goal is to choose a complement or near-complement that makes the cooler appear naturally darker, lower-chroma, and shadowed, but not like a fully different color.

1. Azo Yellow (PY151): Glaze in Indanthrone Blue (PB60) came out too green, though I think the self-mixed violet (PB29 + PV19 rose) came out a bit on the pink side. Still, more successful.
2. Pyrrol Scarlet (PR255): I don’t hate either the Phthalo Blue GS or Phthalo Green YS shadow options here. I probably prefer the blue as the green comes out a bit brownish.
3. Transparent Pyrrol Orange (PO71): Same Phthalos as glaze options; I find these uglier.
4. Self-mixed orange from PR209 + PY65: Pretty much the same as PO71.
5. Phthalo Green YS (PG36): I think the PV19 rose glaze is pretty nice. PR255 is a bit brownish, as in the reverse direction.
6. Self-mixed violet from PV19 + PB28: I tried four glazing options here since I could not seem to get it right. PY150 looses weird, PY129 just disappears, PB36 is weirdly kind of okay, and MANS is too brownish. All of them caused a little lifting which I did not love. Probably Cobalt Blue is not staining enough to use as the lower layer.
7. Cobalt Blue (PB28): I did not like either PO71 or Terra Cotta. Too brown. Not sure what would better.
8. Phthalo Blue GS: The PO71 was far too yellow but the PR255 worked better.

In a real-world scenario, some of the ones I didn’t like as much might actually be useful, like if I wanted a browner/warmer color for some reason.

Project #1: General Glaze

Dobie does not directly assign a project in either chapter, but I feel like implicitly the project is to use glazing to improve the color harmony of a painting with “too bright” or “not harmonious” colors. I’m far too conceited to think that applies to any of my paintings!

Instead, I just took one of my most recent paintings. Here’s the reference.

I didn’t really dislike the colors I originally used for the scene, but they are more blue/red and less yellow than the reference, so I thought maybe I’d do a sort of yellow cast.

I used MANS and Manganese Violet glazes to add texture and yellow or violet casts. I think I prefer the pre-glazed version: it’s crisper and less overworked-looking. (I’m also guessing the colors are more similar to real life, and that the yellow glaze emulates a yellow filter on the reference.) A problem with using glazes to adjust colors is that you can’t adjust any of the colors lighter so things can tend toward looking darker and duller.

Project #2: Glaze Around

Here’s an example where I tried the method of glazing around the subject to try to make it pop out more.

Here’s the reference photo. It’s a cherry blossom photo I took several years ago.

Here’s my first draft on the left, and on the right, I darkened the colors around the cherry blossoms.

The difference is subtle, but the darkened background does make the pink stand out more! There is something I liked about the bright green-to-pink vibration that’s a bit less in the new version, though. (I am feeling some level of sympathy since it was hard to color-correct them the same, but it’s still much better matched than the example in the book.)

Conclusion

As evidenced by my putting them together, I think these two chapters are basically the same. Actually, I liked chapter 13 more after I read chapter 14, because chapter 14 includes some elements that I found missing from chapter 13, such as a side-by-side example and more implementation ideas. So, I’ll consider them as a unit.

I appreciate that this section has a clear and simple thesis: glazing can be deployed after a painting is already done in order to have specific effects. In my words, glazing can:

• Reduce chroma
• Darken values
• Shift hue / color temperature

These effects can be deployed over the whole painting, or in a section. Use of glaze in a section can help to increase contrast from the unglazed section.

Dobie doesn’t explicitly make this point, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that glazing can’t generally do the opposite: it can’t brighten or lighten.

These chapters gets props for making a clear point, containing a detailed exercise, and giving some examples and ideas. I also think these ideas make a case of the practical usefulness of glazing that the previous three chapters did not.

Conceptually, I love that chapter 14 shows the before-and-after of a single painting, but the usefulness is reduced by extreme color inconsistencies in printing (possibly out of Dobie’s hands, and possibly edition-specific).

While I don’t always think glazing is the right choice, it’s a great tool for the toolbelt and I think it’s useful to consider as a final step in a painting to see if all or part of the scene can take some color correction.

Grade: B