Rules for Glazing

The rules for glazing are actually pretty simple.

1. If you start with a cooler, more opaque underpainting, you can glaze warmer and darker over it.

2. If your underpainting is warm and dark, you can scumble cooler and lighter on top.

When you glaze with darker paint, it tends to warm things up. When you scumble with lighter paint, it cools things down.

These are basic principles worth keeping in mind when playing with optical effects in oil painting.

In this little She-Wolf painting, I began with a fairly opaque, wet-into-wet first pass—just the first few hours of laying things in. Then I let it dry for about a week. When I came back, I started redrawing using glazes. This is the fun part: you can vary the color, the texture, and the transparency of your glaze. You can scrub, mop, hatch, or leave areas more pigmented or more neutral. It’s incredibly versatile.

The only thing you really want to avoid with glazing is overdoing it. That’s the main pitfall. There’s a bit of a taboo around glazing in some academic circles—people say it’s too strong or ruins the painting. And yes, if your glaze is too heavy-handed, it can completely overpower your first pass. But done subtly, it can actually enhance everything.

You can even paint into a glaze—that’s called working into a couch. A couch is just a thin, oiled-out layer you can paint into while it’s still wet. It can be transparent or semi-transparent, depending on your needs.

So how beautiful or ugly a glaze turns out really depends on the strength of your pigment, the transparency of the color, and how much you’re altering the layers underneath. In this case, I knew I wanted the She-Wolf to be a dark form against a light background—that was my anchor. From there, I used glazing to shift and shape things subtly, without losing that original intention.