Glazing and other Painting Techniques

1. Introduction: I'm Kristy Gordon and I've been a full-time painter since 2004. I've shown my work in exhibitions across Europe and North America. I've taught drawing and painting classes in schools such as the New York Academy of Art and the National Academy in New York. In this class, I'll show you the magical wonders of glazing, scumbling and impasto. Glazing is an amazing technique that's been used since the late 15th century, especially in the Northern Renaissance by artists like van der widen and bam Ike. What I love most about this class is that I find that a lot of people think of glazing is some mystical, difficult thing to do. But in this class I'll show you how fun and easy it can be through applications such as creating luminous colors in drapery, and how to make refinements with semi-transparent glazes in a portrait. I'll also show you glazing applications for the landscape. Then we'll move into scumbling, which was a really wonderful technique, somewhat similar to glazing and that you're applying a transparent coat over top of a dry under painting. The difference is that with scumbling, you're going to be using this rubbing motion with your brush. You're going to actually use opaque paint, not with any medium in it, but just applying it so thin that it's what's called a scumble. It's an amazing technique for creating soft, misty, cloud-like effects. I'll contrast that with the technique of impasto, which really brings forward the highlights. I'll show you how to mix thick goofy paint and place it onto the canvas in such a way that it creates really appealing, thicker highlights in your lights. To conclude, I'll show you how to combine all three painting techniques, glazing, scumbling, and impasto in one painting to create really effective glowing techniques that would be absolutely impossible to achieve otherwise with just regular paint application. I'm really excited about this class and let's get started. 2. Glazing, Scumbling and Impasto Materials: In terms of the materials, I have my palette setup on some white palette paper. On the palette we have titanium white, cadmium yellow light, cadmium yellow deep, cad orange, cadmium red light, Alizarin permanent, burnt sienna, yellow ocher, some cobalt blue, Viridian green, ultramarine blue, ivory black, and I also have some premixed mixtures. This is a mid tone gray made of ivory black and titanium white, and we've got a base flesh color, that's made with the cadmium orange, the titanium white and a little bit of this blue mixture. The blue mixture is made of ultramarine blue and some titanium white. Lastly, I have what I call it base shadow color mixture that consists of ultramarine blue and cadmium orange. I have a range of brushes of Filbert's and bright brushes, and I have some blue shop towels as well as some worn out alkyd medium , which I have in a little container on my palette. There are various mediums that you can use for a glaze. This one here is one that I really like, it's by Gamblin and it's called solvent free gel. It's actually non-toxic, it's made with a base of sunflower and alkyd painting medium. It does speed the drawing a little bit and it also has a little bit of a thicker consistency, which I'll show you why, but that can be really beneficial. Then I also use one the alkyd medium, which also is non-toxic. It's thin like linseed oil. It will speed the drawing a little bit and I'll show you the benefits to that as well as some of the drawbacks. You could also use something like liquin. Liquin has a thicker goopier feel, it is toxic. For me, I like to keep my process non-toxic and so that basically shows you the basic medium. First let's take a look at walnut alkyd medium, so when you're preparing to make your glaze, you're going to use a lot of the medium basically, and just a little bit of pigment, and you'll find that as you get familiar with the paints, some paint colors are more transparent than others. You can glaze with any of them, but some will be even more transparent than others. For example, this one which is burnt sienna is a very transparent color. I'm just using a very little bit of pigment and a whole lot of the medium and mixing it together and you can see how transparent that is. Whereas if you use a color that has a little bit more of an opacity to it like red and mix a bunch of the medium in, you can still get it to be transparent, but it's just a little bit more, it's like semi-transparent, but it's close to transparent. But as you get familiar with it, you will be able to feel the difference. Then just to show you the difference here, this solvent free gel is thicker. and again, let's just use red. We'll be using red later in the demo, so again, you'll just use a very small amount of pigment compared to a whole lot of medium. That's a little bit too much pigment, it's not quite transparent enough, so let's squeeze more medium in, and you can see how it shows the white coming through underneath, you can feel that it's getting to be pretty transparent, I'll just make it even a bit more transparent. To basically make a glaze, all it means is that you're using a lot of medium, either oil or some glazing medium like this solvent free gel versus a very small amount of pigment. 3. Glazing: So glazing is always done on a completely dry painting. You'll want to make sure that you're painting is thoroughly dry before you go into any glazes on it. Just to give you a couple examples of applications of glaze. Let's say for example that I had worked on this painting a couple of days before, and I came back to it ready for a new sitting before I really dive into it, and I notice that the whole thing feels too like pinky, it doesn't feel like rich enough. One thing that you could do is take a glaze. I'm just going to use that burnt sienna color, with a little yellow ocher added, that we made in the beginning. Just make it really thin. You can just basically pull a little glaze of that all across the whole entire surface of the flesh to just alter the hue of the painting just a little bit, without having to repaint all of the rendering. So you're still able to maintain the rendering. You can see the lights, and the shadows, and the forms that you developed before, and it's just enhancing the color just a little bit. Then say, you did that and it just feels a little bit too heavy handed. You can also take a rag and just lighten up the glaze a little bit, so it's just ever so slight. I will say that sometimes when you're using, because that was just the walnut alkyd medium, it's the same consistency as just linseed oil. Sometimes when you do that, you may find that the uncertain areas, it'll actually seem to repel a little bit, and if you ever see that, just wipe it off completely, really clean up the surface of your painting. Take a very fine sand paper. This is p220, so a 220 grit sandpaper, and you can just like give it a light sand, very light. It will just open up the pores of the paint a little bit, so it'll take better. You might see there's little dots of the texture of the canvas. You never want to do this on an absolutely finished painting. In this case, I'll be painting more into it, so it's okay. Then wipe it carefully to get all the grits of the sandpaper off. Then you could go in with your glaze and you'll find that it really takes really well. The pores are open and it just holds, and there is no sense of it repelling in any way. Again, you can always put down a glaze and then take off a little of the excess if you feel like it's too strong. But you can see how it's basically adjusting the colors. It gives it really a luminous quality. It's giving her hair more of a luminous, saturated, orangey-brown this is burnt sienna feel. Let's say we wanted to make her lips bright red. We could just bring a little bit of a red glaze right over her lips, and just adjust that color. You can see how easy it is because, we're still able to see all of the rendering that I took so much time before to establish, and now we're just basically bringing in a different color, and a lot of the time more of a luminous color. You'll find that the color of the glaze, like in this case, the red, shows up the most in the lighter areas. It does give a certain richness to the shadows, but the real color of it shows up in the lighter areas. There are some colors like red, that you can't really do, like say a red cloth, with that really saturated luminous red quality without glazes. Because when you add white to red, it ends up looking pink. If you want really luminous light reds that still feel like red though, you'll need to do it with a glaze. So I've prepared this little canvas for a demo. Basically what I've done is I've taken, it's a cloth and I've painted the shadows with a dark red and a little bit of black. So they're really dark and then rolling into the lights, just a little bit of red. But I've really blasted out the lights to be white, so I'm painting it with a higher contrast, than what I intend for it to end up at. Then I'll basically take this red glaze which I prepared for you, in the first demo, and I'll just glaze the red over it. You can see how now it looks like the red cloth that I intended it to be. The lights don't look pink, but they look like they've got form rolling up to a light note that still feels red. The type of thing that artists, and say the Northern Renaissance would have had to do with some of the really luminous fabrics that they were painting, colors like green and colors like red, you'll find were really luminous and they would have been done with glazes. Also what you can do with a glaze is, so you've done the glaze on a thoroughly dry painting. Now the glaze is wet, and while it's still wet, you can even just paint back into it, now with an opaque paint. This is white mixed with a little bit of red, it's not a glaze is actually a fully opaque paint. You could bring a little highlights into certain areas. The idea is that you can basically glaze it when it's thoroughly dry, and then paint into the glaze with opaque paint when it's still wet, and that's going to create a really nice sense of depth, a really nice surface quality to your painting. 4. Refining with Semi-Transparent Glazes: Pure fully transparent glazes like I showed you in the last two examples are done with no white. But a lot of the time as I go into the finishing touches of a painting and I'm refining the features, I'll actually do what's called semi-transparent glazes. Where I will have a bit of the base flesh color which contains white, mixed in, and I'll be able to refine the features in that way. Basically what I would do, I would use the Walnut Alkyd Medium or Linseed oil for that, since it's thinner, it'll actually help the paint flow more fluidly as I apply it, versus the Solvent-Free Medium, the other one that was a bit more gel-like. Yeah, let's see. I'll use a little bit of base flesh color. I would mix up the color like I'm intending for it to be, and then I would just use a lot more medium again, so that it's creating. You can see how it's a Semi-Transparent Glaze and that's because there is some white in it. Then, in that way I would be able to refine the features but not have to worry about matching the exact same color as I matched, as I mixed in the previous session. It'll just be enhancing it and adding more levels of complexity to what I've already got. But I know a lot of my students have talked about the difficulty in coming back to a painting, a few days after they've painted and it is just having a really hard time mixing that color that's already on. But it actually becomes a non-problem when you are refining the finishing touches, with a series of small Semi-Transparent Glazes, because the under-painting is still glowing through, and informing what you're putting on top, you can still see the line that was there. But we're just refining it a little bit, rounding into it. It might be a little bit subtle in this demo, but it's enhancing what's being put down, so I'm not losing all the work from our previous session. I'm just adding more levels of complexity to it with a series of thin, Semi-Transparent Glazes. That gives you an idea, I just did a little bit on the nose there. But that just gives you an idea of how you can basically be mixing the color, using all the different colors that you might want, mixing the color that you intend for it to be, but then just adding extra oil, to make it Semi-Transparent as you apply it. The other thing is that almost all the time I'll have my shadows being more transparent than my highlights. All of these shadows and dark areas and the hair, are done with extra oil, pretty much always so that they have a certain transparency to it. The idea is that then, the eye has to move back through all the layers of glaze, and that pushes the shadows back, and then the impastos, the thicker parts of the lights actually catch the light of the room and come forward towards us, so you're getting an optical sculptural effect with the quality of paint. For example, as I'm going into the refinements of the hair, I would use burnt sienna and maybe a little bit of black. I'm using a Grainer brush, it's a pretty worn out Grainer brush actually but, so it has some long hairs and some short hairs and I would be glazing all of these strokes in as I do them. The other thing about glazing is, the paint does flow more fluidly when you're glazing and that really helps for things like hair, for getting that line equality to the hair. These are more precise glazes, it's transparent paint because there's more media mixed in. But, I'm really just applying it only in select little areas and using a lot of consideration. I'm not just applying it over the whole thing, in either of the cases with the nose or with the hair. I'm selectively choosing areas to introduce this, small little refining glaze. 5. Glazing Applications for the Landscape: I've shown you some examples of true glazes That are totally transparent, as well as semi-transparent glazes as they apply to the figure and now I want to just take a look at some common issues that can arise as you're developing a landscape and how glazes can help you as you refine your landscape as well. With a landscape, there's a lot of atmospheric perspective where the objects closest to us should end up having the darkest darks in them and objects further behind us, different elements like the trees that are further back in the distance. The dark shouldn't be as dark as those in the light. In this case, I've established as a basic flat color lay into the landscape. Now I want to show you how we can use a glaze to knock back these areas as well as increased the luminosity of other areas. I'm going to start by using a grayish blue, maybe a little bit of white. This is going to be a semi-transparent glaze. I use a lot of the glazing medium, which in this case is just one that alkyne medium, you can see it's dripping. You can see it's really thin and I'm just going to take a little of the excess off with a rag and let's just see what that looks like. Okay, it's a little heavy. Let's add a little bit more blues well, and a little bit more medium. The nice thing about glazing is that there's no risk involved. You want to always make sure your paintings thoroughly dry before you go into any glazes. Since this is thoroughly dry, you can just wipe it off and take it right back to the place where it started. If anything remains, you can dip it into a little bit of odorless mineral spirit. I've just got a little odorless mineral spirits on my rag and it just wipes right off. Now let's try just adding a little bit more of a blueish white and a little bit more medium. I'll rub down, okay and so at first it looks a little heavy, but actually this is going to be good. As I pull it across the surface, I can see that it thins out a little bit. You can see what's there underneath. Maybe I'll even introduce a little bit more white into this. I'm going to take the excess off afterwards with my rag. I'm just going to make an even thinner by taking a bit more off with my rag, it's really just a thin translucent code, but you can see how much depth that's starting to achieve this whole background area is now sitting back further and the foregrounds coming forward. I'm going to do a little bit more of that on the sides. I'm not doing these two trees here because I want them to have the darks and really come forward. This as sort of a grayish color right now I'm using a bit more of a blue, the sky color actually, and just bringing that in, it's really easy, it just looks really good right away. Just really gives a huge sense of atmospheric perspective and a really beautiful soft, misty way that just adds a really nice level of complexity to the type of paint application that you're using. You wanted to bring this tree forward again, you can dip it into linseed oil or some odorless mineral spirits and just wipe it out. You can apply it to some areas and then wipe it off in other areas if you want to bring certain parts back out a little bit. Let's do the same thing on the ground. Only with the ground, I want to actually increase the luminosity of the marks on the ground.I'm going to do a yellow glaze. Again, making sure that you use a lot of medium and only a little bit of pigment. I'll just bring it through the areas. Again a lot of the time, I'll find that it's just a little bit too intense. This is obviously pretty intense. I'll just use a rag to actually lift just a little bit, not all of it, but just a little bit off. To add even more depth, what I'm going to do is another glaze, This time back into this bluish color that I used in the background. I'm going to bring a little bit of that down onto the back ground mass as well so the foreground moss is affected by this yellow glaze, but the back ground moss is actually affected by this hazy bluish sky colored glaze. I'm just doing a series of glazes to basically increase the sense of depth. Maybe I'll take a bit more of this off too. Then a lot of the time what's really best to do with glazes is to do a glaze when your paintings thoroughly dry. Once you've done the glaze, then paint back into it on top with opaque paint. So I'm going to get a bit of the sky color this time with no medium mixed in. Just go in with some little highlights here and there and just pull out certain parts just to add some crispness back so that it's not all hazy, so there's a balance of sharp edges and the soft, hazy, glazed sort of edges. Actually one other thing I'm going to wipe this off in the center. You can, you can see how useful that is to do it. Just, one other thing is that you can also use bluish, whitish color. A bunch of the medium, the one that alkyne medium in this case. I'll just take the excess off with my rag. I was thinking, I wanted to show you how to create like the effects of light coming through trees. In that case, you'll want to analyze the lighting in your painting. I can see based on this tree that there's light on this side, shadow on this side same with this tree, the light's coming this way. If I'm going to put a light beam into the painting, it needs to be coming this way. This is a glaze, this is called a semi-transparent glaze and that's because it's got some white in it. But it creates really easily complex lighting effects that can be really visually appealing. It's pretty easy to put that in so you can see how nice that looks. Then at that point again, I would maybe paint back into it, maybe add some little highlights here and there. Maybe, maybe paint into the moss maybe go a little bit of moss texture, hitting the lightest lights on top of our luminous moss. Basically glaze and then paint back into a glaze and then paint back into it. This is with opaque paint with no medium mixed in, that gives you an idea of how different types of glazing from the true glaze with no white, which was what we did for the yellow to a semi transparent glaze that contains a bit of white and how that can be used to create atmospheric effects in a landscape. 6. Glazing to Create Watery Effects: Glazes are great for painting water. They have the same consistency as water, they're shiny, they're transparent. All water should basically always be painted with a glaze. To do that, I'm going to use my grain or brush and I've established just a basic color to lay in. I've got the trees above the water, we've got the horizon line. A reversed flipped image of the trees above with more of wiggly ripple pattern below. I'm going to show you how I would enhance that through glazes to bring it to a finer finish. Again, I would use a lot of medium. I would start by doing like a bigger glaze, maybe bringing some ripply stuff into the bottom. Keep the brush strokes horizontal. It makes it look like flatter, so even if you're doing something that has an overall diagonal thrust to it. I wiggle it back and forth horizontally so that it also has a horizontal nature to it. That helps the water feel nice and flat. Maybe I'll do some semi-transparent glazes. This blue has a bit of white mixed in. I'll do that over some of this area so that I basically make some of the darks that are back there. Let's use a little bit of white. I'm just a little bit less strong, so it has a more fluid feel to it. Everything in the water, everything in a reflection in the water, should be darker than anything in the sky. I'm going to show you in this gambling demo how it would go into the sky. Some of this guy is going to get lighter than it is. Just remember that in the finishing touches, the finishing refinements and assessments, just to make sure that everything, the trees reflected in the water will be darker than the real life version of them above the water. I'll do the same thing over on this side using horizontal notes with a bluish whitish color to just add more subtlety and using glazes to refine it. Sometimes, I'll dip into this darker color and do little glazes into that as well. We could also use a little bit more of a semi-transparent, just a bit more opaque, actually of a white, but still a semi-transparent glazes not fully opaque and just horizontally bring it in with horizontal strokes but moving the brush down as I go. This could be like light reflection. Maybe they'll be a cloud up here. I finesse it over again using horizontal strokes. A lot of the time will also be, like this is where the water is really still where it's got a reflection of the land above it. Right against the shoreline, the water actually might be more ripply and it'll create a long horizontal node. There can sometimes be different passages, maybe another couple horizontal nodes in different areas. It's basically showing different passages of water where some areas are still water and some areas are ripply water. That basically shows how I would use glazes to go into the water. Again, keeping it really transparent and keeping your strokes horizontal as you go. You can see how glazes are very useful in adjusting an overall color of something like you saw with the figure. Doing subtle refinements to the features, enhancing the luminosity like you saw with the red cloth and adding more depth and atmosphere like you saw in the landscape painting, and definitely in creating really watery fluid effects for water. 7. Scumbling to Create Clouds and Mist: Scumbling is a paint application technique that involves pulling a thin translucent layer of opaque paint over your surface. To do that, I'm going to be using a stiff bristle brush. You can see it has a certain amount of spring to it, and I'll not be using any medium. I'll just start by using some white and maybe just a touch of gray. Again, there's no medium mixed in, so it's going to be opaque paint. I'll take a bit of the excess paint off with my rag, and I'll start by just doing a scrubbing motion with the brush. So I'm pulling a thin, translucent coat over the canvas. I'm starting at the areas that are brightest. So that will be where the paint is most opaque. Then as I move, I move into the areas where it's a little bit darker, just because by the nature of there being less paint on my brush, the more I work at it, the more light the note will become. So you can see that it makes a puffy, fluffy technique. So it really mimics mist in that it's putting opaque particles in a translucent way over top of a darker surface a lot of the time. A lot of the time, I find that the applications that I use scumbling for involve bringing a lighter coat on top of a darker one. I wouldn't say that that's always the case, but most of the time it is. If you listen, you can hear the scrub. You can hear the stiff bristle and the scrub motion that I'm doing. So you can see that it makes a fluffier, very cloud-like effect than something say, taking a lot of paint and doing a brush stroke, which has a harder edge. So that's in contrast to the scumbling and the way we're pulling a translucent coat in this scrubbing way, the softness that that creates. As I go, I'm going to also block in some shadow passages. So I'm going to use some gray. There's a little bit of ultramarine mixed into this base of gray made with ivory black and titanium white. So just as usual, we're going to want to block in a light side and a shadow side. So I'm blocking in the shadow side of my clouds. So here, I guess I am using a darker note with the scumble. So it's not always light. I really think of scumbling a lot of the time as being done with a lighter note on a darker ground. I think because that also has applications for the figure and for instances where you'll be creating an optical cool, which I'll show you in another demo in this series. So the paint is basically being applied somewhat thin, but being scrubbed into the surface. So rather than getting a dry brushy effect, we're getting this scumbled effect where the texture of the edges is more cloud-like and just soft and not really dry brushy. Anywhere that it does look dry brushy, you'll actually want to, even with your finger, just rub a little bit more so that you're getting an effect that's not dry brushy. So if you look here, you can see the texture of the canvas right in there. That isn't what we're going for. But if I just rub it a little bit more, it will affect the scumble making it better and making it have more of that softness and the translucency at the edge. Just bringing a little bit of the shadow side into the clouds on this side. Maybe the bottom cloud, I'll just play with the hue a little bit, making it a little bit more blue than gray. So you can have little shifts in the color as you go. You could even shift a little bit in the lights, maybe making it a little bit more yellowish white in some parts. That might be a little bit too strong, let's add a bit more white in and just tone that yellow down. There we go. I'll rub it a little bit more. So you can actually use your fingers too. Basically by rubbing it, what I'm doing is I'm increasing the translucency. I'm actually taking some of the paint off and making it more translucent. I think it would also be nice to have some parts of the lights be a little bit more orangeish, just ever so slightly. Maybe I'll just bring a bit of a pinky orange, that over here too. Then maybe I'll just rub the edge. Again, that's increasing the translucency, so really making the scumbling effect even better. Maybe as I do the distant cloud in the background, the light side of it, I'll use a little bit more of a bluish whitish hue. So by using the effect of scumbling and basically doing notes with opaque paint with no medium mixed in, and using the brush in such a way that I'm basically scrubbing the paint on, which applies the paint really thin, it creates these really cloud-like effects and just really actually mimics the actual consistency of the material of cloud in the application of paint. Then another application that's really exciting to consider with this is that it's also really good for mist. So say I wanted to knock back this tree line and just make it a bit more misty, I'm going to take up a bluish, whitish, opaque. Again, because scumbling is always done with opaque paint. With no medium, no linseed oil or anything like that mixed in. Basically, I'm going to rub it over top of this perfectly dry underpainting. So always make sure when you go into scumble, that you're working on a underpainting, an initial color layer and that's perfectly dry. Maybe give it a day or two to dry, double-check that it's dry. So I've pulled this over and you can see it's a little heavy-handed and very dry brushy. Then I'm just going to take my rag and rub at it, which is like when I was using my fingers, it's basically increasing the translucency, making it even thinner. But really working it into the grain of the texture of the canvas and just setting the whole treeline back. So it actually is just like a layer of mist. It's a whitish hazy layer that's just sitting right on top, really mimicking the reality of trees with a misty, hazy layer on top of them. You could even dip your rag into some oil at this point. This is a rag dipped, just the tip, into a little bit of linseed oil, and you could even pick out some parts. Just erase out some parts. So that there's some mistier areas and some less misty areas. Maybe on these trees, we want to have some hanging mist. So as if it's a really misty day and there's just passages of mist hanging in the air. This is just to give you some ideas of what's possible with scumbling. So that gives you some ideas on this painting. The next thing I'm going to do is show you some examples of scumbling to create optical cools in a portrait setting. 8. Scumbling to Create "Optical Cools": Next I'll show you how to create optical cools using scumbling and essentially I'm going to show you how we're going to use a base flesh color pulled across the surface in such a thin and transparent way using the technique called scumbling and in doing so, create optical cools in our portrait paintings. I'm going to start with this basic flesh color. I'll just put a dab on to my painting to see how that looks and I think it could be a little bit darker and a little bit cooler. I'm just mixing a bit of burnt sienna into my base flesh color and that looks pretty good. I'm starting with the base flesh color and I want to work up nearer the forehead. I'm basically going to be introducing these optical cools up into the forehead area right along the hairline and what you'll find is that a lot of the time in the hairline, it's almost like the way the hair follicles appear, growing underneath a thin layer of the skin actually creates like in real life, this optical cool. When you look at a person along their hairline, you'll find that there is this certain coolness right along the hairline which also is very very soft. It's like a lost edge. It's sfumato. In other words, there's no real end to the hair and beginning to the forehead and I'm going to apply this opaque paint onto a perfectly dry canvas and I'll just use my finger to rub at the edge and that's really increasing the transparency, the translucent, hazy quality to the paint. I'll just show you more of a close up over here just in this dark area so that you can really see what I'm talking about. But essentially I'm using actually a warm color of paint. Again, you can remember it was made with base flesh color, burnt sienna, and just a little bit of gray, but essentially it looks warm. But in the context of all of the other warms around it and the fact that it's a lighter tone on top of a darker tone, you can see how right along the edge we really get the strong, opalescent, bluish quality and that's the optical cool that I'm talking about and as you become more familiar with this technique, you'll really discover that it occurs when you pull the paint with your finger or with a scrubbing motion with your brush making an opaque paint translucent just by the thinness of the application and so that we see some of the darker tone underneath glowing through this lighter warm tone and creating that bluish optical Cool. I'll just wipe that out and let's go back up to the hairline and now you understand more clearly the principle behind it and you really do need to play around with this to really get a feel for it in your own work. But I'm just going to introduce this along the hairline, this warmish color, this base flesh tone, and burnt sienna color and just rub it at the edges right along the hairline and even now, the way that I'm wiggling my brushes, is that scrubbing motion that I was talking about where you can scrub the paint on with your brush and actually put it on in a translucent thin equality and you can really see how cool this does look. It actually looks a little bit bluish, like hazy quality that I'm introducing along the hairline and it can be nice to apply this technique along the edge of where the shadows meet the lights as well and there's lots of applications for this technique, but that gives you a sense of how you can use scumbling, which is again, pulling a translucent thin coat of opaque paint over a dry surface and create optical cools in doing so. 9. Impasto Painting: Impasto paint application essentially refers to paint that is really thick and basically globby like it sticks out from the canvas. A lot of the time artists use it in areas of the light, so that the lights in the painting stand out and actually catch the light of a room. Then you'll use glazing in the shadows so that the shadows basically set back and the impastos in the lights come forward, which can create a really sculptural effect and bring out a lot of form. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to add the impastos to this painting. I'm using a big thick brush, it's a bristle brush. There's a good amount of spring to it, and I'm going to start with some base flesh color and some white. I'm mixing up a lot of paint because we're going to use a lot of paint to put it down in a thick way. As I lift up the paint, as I load my brush, I'm basically rather than brushing to pick up the paint, I'm actually going to push the brush to really scoop out the paint, so I have a lot of paint you can see it's sticking out on my brush. Then I'm going to go in, and I'm going to place that on the painting. It looks a little bit too light. That might be good for the lightest light. Let's mix into that some more base flesh color so that it'll get progressively less light as it moves away from our lightest area, and it'll basically transition into the skin tones around it. I'm just going to keep working with this, applying a little bit more of a fleshy colored note around that lightest note. Then what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take a smaller brush. This is actually a greener brush that has some long hairs and some short hairs. I'm just going to finesse the very edge of this gloppy impasto paint, so that we don't have a thick globby edge to it. Instead, the thicker gloppy stuff is going to be in the center of this, and then it'll just segue gradually out from there and meld into the paint around it. It's getting better. I typically do this in most of the lightest areas, the very highlighty areas. Let's load up the brush again, and I think I could bring a little bit of a thicker application of paint into some of the top plane of her cheeks. It's obscured by her glasses in this case, but usually there will be some thicker impastos along there. I can also take a smaller brush, and let's just wiggle along the edge of these notes, so they set in. They don't, again have a thick edge. A little bit more up here as well. Then for the highlight on the tip of the nose, even that can be done with a little bit more of a thicker paint, so that there's a certain physicality and it sticks out from the Canvas and you can see how shiny that makes it look and then help it to fit into the context of the painting by finessing the edge of it with a little bit more of a fleshy note, a little bit less white. Maybe bring a bit of that along the edge of the turning plane, the edge of the front plane of the nose, and maybe I'll also give a smaller impasto textured paint down on her chin. Again, it starts with a strong note of it and then I start to work the edges, working it to fit in. But I find I need to start with quite a strong note, otherwise I'll work it in so much that it won't stick out anymore. Because again, the whole point of impasto is that it sticks out from the Canvas. It's so thick that it's physically three-dimensionally coming forward to us. Then I finesse the edges of that so that it becomes a part of the painting, so that it doesn't just feel like really out of place. I am using a little bit of a thinner application down here and a little bit thicker at the top so that it basically is thicker. More sticky audi, the lighter the area, the more the highlight is actually catching on the area the more it'll actually stick out. I'm actually going to even go a little bit thicker in the center of this one, there. That's better, so that there's a real sense that this is sticking out and coming towards us. It actually helps the shadows set back even further. I might even just dab, just rub it a little bit. I really like to have the edges of the impasto segue very gradually, away from the thickest note so that it feels like it fits into the Canvas. Maybe even just a little bit more on this edge. In that way, you can get away with quite a thick application of paint, because it's transitioned in such a way that it fits into the painting. That shows you impasto and how to basically use the brush work scooping up the paint and placing the thick galbi part down and then softening the edges to make it fit in, and how much three-dimensionality and visual interest it gives to your painting. Next, we're going to take a look at the application of these three techniques, glazing, stumbling, an impasto to all come together to create a glowing effect. 10. Painting a Glowing Candle with Glazing, Scumbling and Impasto: Let's take a look at how these three techniques of glazing, scumbling, and impasto can come together to be used in such a way that you can create the effect of a glowing candle. So I've got a color lands started just a very flat application of paint massing in the overall color areas. I'm going to use some white and something light and warm, some yellow. We're going to glaze on top of this after. So I'm not going to go for the fullest level of warmth, then I'm going to be achieving with glazes later. I'm just wanting to make it light and opaque. I'm going to take the excess paint off my brush. I'm going to start by just scumbling in with an opaque paint. So it's just a yellow. Again, there's no mixture, no medium mixed in. I'm just going to sort of overshoot the edges of my candle flame a little bit and then I'm going to rub with my fingers. So I'm using the scumbling technique to first create the glow, the radiating light that extends beyond the edges of the flame itself. What we're going to do is let that dry thoroughly and glaze on top of it next to create the color effects that we want. So I'm just going to finesse this a little bit, working with it until it feels about the right shape and the right gradation out to nothingness, just finessing the edges until the progression from color to black feels right. I'm liking the way this side's working. Let's just finesse this one a little bit. Just rubbing it, again, make sure you're under painting is thoroughly dry before you go into scumble into it. I think I want, as it moves towards the light, it to just become a little bit lighter. So I'm just applying a little bit more paint with this scumble right up next to the edge of the flame and just making sure the edges feel nice and soft. The more I rub it, the more I'll sort of get rid of the dry brushy feel. In other words, the texture of the canvas showing here and let's just make sure my hands are clean. Just wiping it off on my rag and maybe I'll just take a little bit off that edge there and that feels good to me. So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to apply the impasto. So I'm going to use a lot of white, just basically really thick paint. I'll use some yellow as well. Again, I'm going to glaze on top of this. So I'm basically going to scoop this whitish yellow mixture. Instead of like brushing to pick up the paint, I'm actually scooping to pick up the paint. So I've got a lot of paint right on the tip of my brush. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to place this goofy blobby mass right into the center of my flame. I think to mimic the effect of like a flame and the impasto involved in that. I'm going to just flatten out a little bit of the impasto with a palette knife. So even the thickness of the palette knife impasto, we can still feel it. Even though it's not the gloppy impasto, it still has a certain lift and a certain consistency that's different from the application of paint without the impasto, the thick paint. Then I've really got to glob down in the brightest part of the flame right at the base. So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to let this dry thoroughly, maybe for a few days, and then we're going to come back and glaze it as the final touch. All right, so as you can see, the painting is thoroughly dry. I've let it dry for a few days and I'm going to be using this scumbling solvent free gel, which I really like because it's non-toxic and as you can see, it has a goopy gel-like consistency, which helps it really adhere well to the canvas. I'm going to start in with a bit of red and a bit of orange, mixing it into a lot of the solvent free gel. I'm going to work that around the edges of the glow. I'll take some of the excess off my brush. Let's make it a little bit more transparent by mixing even more of the gel in. I'm just going to bring it around the edges of the glow effect, so that there's going to be a certain reddish quality around the edges. I'm just mixing a bit more pigment in, I wanted to have a little bit of a stronger sense of that coloration. The more pigment versus medium that you use, the stronger the color. But you do want it to really have a lot of medium. As you can see, the medium itself has a shiny quality. So when you varnish the whole painting at the end, that shininess levels will even out. As I move towards the flame, I'm going to progressively move in towards a more yellowish note so that the color of the glow will basically transition from redish at the edges into a more yellowish note in the center, and ultimately into a white note in the very hottest part. So let's go on with the white in the center, just restating the impasto node. Painting wet into wet and creating a stronger highlight in the very center of the flame to really make it stand out and give it that glowing quality. Let's add a little bit more towards the top of the flame. Let me take that off my brush. If you haven't had white mixed in on your brush, it creates less of a transparent tone. So taking the white off of the brush and just going back to the yellowy orange notes mixed with some of the solvent free gel to glaze at the bottom of this flame, to spring on a bit of that warmth in. I think I want to bring a little bit of a stronger yellowy note outwards from the flame. It just has a little bit of a stronger light projecting outwards. Just bringing a little bit of a reddish note, just a bit more pigment into the edges, just pumping up that chroma, finessing the exact way that I wanted to transition, from the yellow on the inside out towards the red at the edges there. That would describe, so that shows you how I would basically combined scumbling, impasto, and glazing to create a very convincing effect of glowing.