Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Glazing

Country Landscape
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Acrylic on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

Lesson 43 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about Glazing techniques. Philip defines a glaze as a thin layer of transparent paint used to modify the colour or tone of a painting. It’s a bit like adding a filter in a photo editing app. You can use glazes to warm things up, cool them down or otherwise alter the atmosphere of a picture. You can glaze the whole painting or just a part of it.

Phillip suggests glazing over some of you existing studies. I didn’t have anything suitable, so I tried a more ambitious exercise. I attempted to create a painting entirely with glazes using the techniques described for watercolour by Don Rankin in Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor. 

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

This was my first effort. It’s interesting, but far from what I intended. After that, things went downhill. As I tried to reduce the vibrancy, my attempts got uglier and uglier. The main challenges are the intensity and opaqueness of acrylics when compared to watercolour. You need to thin the acrylic to an almost homeopathic level of dilution to get anything like a watery watercolour wash and even then, it still doesn’t behave like watercolour. After 6 attempts, I accepted I needed a simpler subject, so I went back to the exercises from Don’s books (see Glazing Techniques). I enjoyed painting them and they provided an opportunity to experiment with different cocktails of water, glazing medium and flow improver.

Sea Mist
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Acrylic on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

I still prefer my original watercolour versions, but I am beginning to see how I can apply these techniques to acrylics and I’m looking forward to getting back to the picture I wanted to paint.