Glazing

[Joseph Brzycki]

Could someone explain to me the correct way to go about glazing?
Thanks

[Anne Hall]

Well, maybe not any thread. Still my impression from reading her comments is that she is the past and present master of this technique.

Or pick up a copy of the Ralph Mayer Handbook for Painters.

In a nutshell you need to know how long to let your layers dry and what colors are opaque versus transparent.

[Steven Sweeney]

Joseph,

There's plenty of discussion on the "how" of glazing, but also be aware of the "why' -- and the "why not" -- of the technique. It's kind of a seductive subject, this notion of building up colour or altering tone with thin applications of nearly transparent pigments.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking of glazing as a way to "make up" for not getting colour and tone correct in the first place. An underbaked cake with rancid frosting will still be a big disappointment at the party, no matter how pretty the decorations stuck on at the end. Glazing is used to enhance an already sound passage or painting, not to repair a poor construction.

Be aware that a glaze is, after all, chemically accomplished by compromising the integrity of the paint, introducing an extreme quantity of a dispersant (oil, alkyd, etc.) into the paint to thin out the pigment to a transparent concentration. This tenuously bound pigment is applied in an extremely thin layer, which will not surprisingly be weaker and more brittle than thicker paint applications. And because it's sitting right on top of the painting, a subsequent cleaning to remove old varnish could, even with care, lift some areas of that thin glaze.

So yes, by all means get into the books and the websites and learn as much as you can about it, but use it sparingly and deliberately for a specifically intended purpose. Indiscriminately applied, a glaze can make a passage look muddy or dirty rather than luminous.

Steven

[Peter Jochems]

Most old masters here in the Netherlands didn't glaze. Glazing is one of the most misunderstood aspects of painting I think. There is the so-called 'glazing-myth'.

The dutch old masters relied on the proper mixing of the colours to achieve their effects. 'Glazing' can destroy a well-painted passage. (And I have some experience in wrongly applying glazes )

What they did sometimes was to mix retouching varnish with pigment, so you get a very thin transparant layer. It's a bit like watercolour.

Hope this helps,

Greetings,
Peter

[Juan Martinez]

Peter and Steven,

Very well put; both of you. I'm glad to hear someone finally comment on the myth of the Dutch old masters' "building up layers of glazes". The old Dutch/Flemish "rule of three" techniques would not work if they had, in fact, used nothing but a series of glazes, as some people suppose they did. It is true that they might have used a number of relatively oil-rich layers, but that is not necessarily the same as a glaze.

As Steven pointed out, a glaze can be--and is--used to unify parts or the whole of a painting, once it is more-or-less completed. There are times when you need to strengthen this part, or warm up that one, and it makes more sense to do it as a glaze rather than re-paint the whole passage. But that's about as far as you can go to correct errors using a glaze.

To Joseph: think of glazing as simply "a transparent darker tone laid over a lighter preparation" period. A scumble is the same thing, except it's a light tone over a darker one. I usually use the term "glaze" to mean either of these; the main point being that these are transparent paint applications. In any event, the key is to keep a glaze thin. The transparency is acheived through the thinness of the paint or by using naturally transparent pigments, or both. If you use the latter, you need not add too much oil in order to make the thing transparent, so the paint layer may be stronger. The oil needs the pigment in order to dry properly and form a tough film. The pigment particles act as a matrix for the oil to bond with. It's something like a concrete floor slab that is made stronger by the addition of a metal grid over which the concrete is poured. Without the metal grid, the concrete slab is weak and prone to cracking.

You can keep a glaze relatively lean if you use a more-or-less dry brush technique to apply the paint. I use this a lot and I use my fingers to spread it around, too. In this way, I keep pretty good company because Titian was said to do this endlessly (spread thin paint around with his fingers.)

Anyway, experiment a bit and best of luck to you. Hope this is useful, too.

Juan

[Peter Garrett]

Just a reply to Stephen Sweeney: glazing need not compromise the paint film in any way. The pigment can be rubbed on with a cloth or even a finger, if you have no objection to touching the paint. Oil paint, fortunately, can be spread out easily. What you seem to be describing is more like a tinted varnish or wash. This approach to glazing is guaranteed to result in a very weak film, both as to colour and cohesion etc

Very small amounts of medium are required only to improve the spreadability of the paint. If you 'rub" the glaze on, there is no danger that the paint will be underbound, and lightening it is merely a matter of rubbing off what is too dark or intense. I suspect that many of the problems of muddiness, cracking and darkening are due to the over-use of medium, whether traditional or alkyd. Keep it simple!

[Juan Martinez]

Peter,

Excellently and concisely stated. I couldn't have said it any better than that, as is evidenced by the fact that I didn't.

Just as a further note; I've recently taken to adding some calcium carbonate to, primarily, scumbles. I have found that this way even the thinnest, rubbed-on layer stays put and does not seem to darken to invisibility, as so often happens when trying to lighten a passage with a thin, transparent over-paining. The CaCo3 seems to add just enough body to the paint for it to stabilize at whatever opacity is required of it.

All the best.

Juan

[Michael Fournier]

If you want to see the good and bad effect of using glazes taken to the extreme. Look at the work of Maxfield Parrish. His goal was to match the translucent glow of stained glass with paint.(He also did work in stained and painted glass). His work is beautiful but many of his paintings are also extremely cracked and in danger of being lost. Restorers are tiring to save these works of a talented albeit very unconventional artist. If you consider he was working only as long ago as the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century the fact that his work is in such bad shape should serve as a warning if longevity of your work is a concern.

Now that said a large part of the problem was that in order to speed his work (he was a Illustrator and worked under deadlines) he used cobalt drier in his paint. It speeds drying times but also makes paint very brittle if you use too much.

Also I am sure he knew these things when he was doing it as a Illustrator longevity and prosperity is not your immediate concern getting the work to the publisher on time and getting paid is. So although we now value his work as a painting it was an illustration for income for him. And the client paying the fee did not care much what happened to the work even 2 days after it was reproduced never mind 30-100 years later.

Today there are modern fast drying painting mediums (Liquin) that if used correctly will allow you to mimic the work of Parrish with fewer of the bad side effects.

That said you must remember never put a fast drying layer of paint over a slow drying layer. That is were the term fat over lean comes from. Lean paint or paint with less oil (or a oil based painting medium like linseed oil) will dry faster then Fat paint (paint with more oil)

If you do not follow this rule and paint lean over fat then the top layer dries first but as the lower fat layer dries the top layer can

[Michael Georges]

I work over a highly detailed monochromatic underpainting. For things like backgrounds, clothing, hair, etc., I will use a glaze to define the color of the passage and allow the underpainting to show through thereby defining the detail. The glaze is likened to a thin pane of colored glass. I glaze with a medium that contains a small amount of resin (venice turpentine) to strengthen the film, and I paint almost exclusively on ridgid surfaces.

There are definitely good reasons to glaze - if you have a process and materials that support it.

[Steven Sweeney]

Just a reply to Stephen Sweeney: glazing need not compromise the paint film in any way.

I agree, Peter, assuming the glaze is executed properly. My initial comments were extracted from the Fearmonger Shop Manual because I wrote in the context of the basic inquiry with which the thread began, and I thought a cautionary note was in order so that folks inclined to begin experimenting with the technique didn't needlessly suffer disappointing results. The hazards are minimal and the benefits rewarding if the process is carried out in the manner you described. I intended only to highlight that the new practitioner would do well to become informed about factors such as transparency/opacity of the pigments used, permanent/fugitive quality of those pigments, whether a particular glaze is intended to be a workable or a "finish" layer, whether the relative fat/lean characteristics of the glaze and the layers above and below it are compatible, and so on. Doubtless there are some "happy accidents" that occur, but I'd wager that the most successful glazing is that which has been planned for some time before the painting was ready for it, and planned for a specific effect in the overall picture. The cautionary tone would be worth it if even a few painters are dissuaded from applying, say, multiple layers of corrective "glaze" using an opaque paint thinned to excess with whatever medium might be used in order to achieve transparency.

Part of the "problem" is, as often happens, definition and semantics. What one writer means by "glaze" may be quite different from another's understanding. My devil's-advocate attempt elsewhere to deal with the variously-interpreted term "painterly" was not the highlight of my forensics experiments, and I won't try to top it here.

An end-note G'day to Wollongong from a one-time expat Sydneysider who did his first oil paintings around the Harbour in '95. Loved Arthur Streeton and the Heidelberg School so much, I published an article on them in the U.S. after I returned, to virtually no acclaim (well . . . my mum liked it), but I had a good time with it anyway.

Cheers,
Steven