Glazing Techniques

Country Landscape
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Watercolour on Paper
18cm x 18cm (7" x 7")

The pictures on this post are my versions of some of the exercises from Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor by Don Rankin.

Sea Mist
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Watercolour on Paper
20cm x 18cm (8" x 7")

Glazing is the process of painting a thin ‘wash’ or ‘glaze’ over a dry underpainting. Its most common use is to adjust the colour or tone of an existing wash, but some artists use it to build up a whole painting out of multiple layers. It is a very controllable approach, but it takes experience and practice to perfect.

The technique relies on the transparency of thin watercolour washes - they do not completely obscure the colours and tones in the previous layers.

The Mud Flats
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Watercolour on Paper
22.5cm x 13cm (8.75" x 5")

I am interested in the glazing technique because it is useful for creating interesting surface textures and atmospheric backgrounds. When I started painting, I would sometimes mix a colour on the palette and paint large areas with the same uniform colour. The result tends to be boring and unrepresentative of anything we see in the real world.

Mixing colours on the paper as a wet in wet wash is one way to create variations and transitions in colour. Glazing is another more controllable way to achieve similar results.

Glazing Swatches
Watercolour on Paper
12.5cm x 21.5cm (5" x 8.5")

These swatches may illustrate the point:

• Swatch 1 is a green I mixed on the palette from Indian Yellow, Winsor Blue (Green Shade) and a little Winsor Red.
• Swatches 2, 3, 6 and 7 are wet in to wet washes using the same colours. For each of these I painted the swatch yellow and then added red and blue to the wet paint.
• Swatches 4, 5, and 8 are glazed. For each swatch I painted a yellow layer, let this dry, glazed it with a blue layer, let it dry, glazed it with a red layer, let it dry and then added a final blue layer. I deliberately applied each wash unevenly so the resulting colour is not flat.