Tip: Non-Traditional Glazing

Glazing is a technique introduced hundreds of years ago by early artists. In their day entire paintings were created by adding successive layers of color over a relatively colorless underpainting. Vermeer's Girl with Pearl Earring is a good example. This traditional method of glazing requires tremendous patience and a very good understanding of how colors interact. It is no wonder that this technique has lost favor with modern artists.

Still some artists continue to use glazes in non-traditional ways to create depth, luminosity, and rich colors that are achievable no other way. I find glazing to be one of the techniques that make oils the most forgiving of all painting mediums. It can be used after your initial work to correct value problems, to give missing harmony to the overall painting, or to add subtle shade changes to skin and fabric. If you are unsure of your colors, you can build your tones slowly, layer by layer. If you make an error applying the glaze simply wipe it off and try again. What could be easier?

Glazing can be done using any type of paint, but in oils a medium must be used as the base for the glaze. An oil glaze is not simply thinned paint. This is referred to as a wash. Washes can be used as the first application to a canvas but they lack the vibrancy and permanence of a glaze. Although there are many recipes for oil glaze mediums, the most common and easy to remember is equal parts of turpentine and oil. Once you have mixed this base you simply add the color of your choice.

A good quality linseed oil is most commonly used in glazing because it is glossy and transparent. But for some artists, linseed oil may be too slow drying, may impart too much sheen, or yellow in drying. Walnut oil is more advisable for glazing but harder to find. It is almost totally transparent and does not yellow over time like linseed oil does.

Here are some things to consider when glazing:

• Use extremely thin transparent paints. The thinner the application the quicker it dries.
• Allow each glaze layer to complete dry before overpainting.
• Use soft fine brushes so as to leave no brushmarks.
• Apply only over light-colored areas. When applied over a dark area the desirable effects that come from glazing are lost.
• You don’t have to glaze your entire painting. You can spot glaze just the part of your painting that needs adjustment.
• Don’t hesitate to use regular paint over glazes. The glaze is not a varnish but an integral part of your painting.

Any oil color can be combined with a chosen medium to create a glaze, but for the best effects use only the most transparent colors. These allow light to pass through them and reflect off the surface underneath.

Here is a list of common transparent and semitransparent colors that can be used effectively. Manufacturers indicate the transparency or opaqueness of each color on the label.

• Transparent
• Indian yellow
• Alizarin crimson
• Permanent carmine
• Permanent rose
• Quinacridone magenta
• Winsor violet
• French ultramarine
• Antwerp blue
• Prussian blue
• Viridian
• Winsor green
• Perylene green
• Hooker’s green
• Permanent sap green

Semitransparent

• New gamboges
• Winsor red
• Indanthrene blue
• Cobalt blue

Here is a good example from Robert Burridge showing how transparent colors can be used to give color harmony to the background while the focal point is void of glaze and its effects.