Glazes - by Mahon

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Glazes - by Mahon

I tend to hear the same questions all the time:
- how to glaze
- what is glazing
- what are glazes
- is it the ultimate blending method
- how many glazes are needed to achieve good transitions?

So let us explain the basics:

GLAZING IS SIMPLY PAINTING WITH GLAZES, WHICH ARE TRANSLUCENT PAINTS. THE IDEA IS THAT THE PREVIOUS LAYER IS PARTIALLY SHOWING THROUGH THE NEXT ONE, AND SO ON, SO THAT THE ADDITIONAL LAYERS BUILD UP INTO A SMOOTH TRANSITON OF COLORS.

Let us bust some myths:

1. Glazing doesn't require any special kind of paints. You don't need to buy the special glazes, you can thin your paints or inks down. Of course - if you add too much water they will be difficult to control, so you need to apply them carefully and not drown your model in the glaze.
The glazes you can buy, or available glaze mediums can help - that's no doubt.

2. Glazing is similar to washing but it's not the same. They both are methods of painting with thinned paints, but while washing is about letting your washes flow down into recesses (more or less freely), glazing is about controlled painting with glazes.

3. There's no perfect consistency of paints/glazes - you have to find your own Holy Grail of Glazing. One painter will prefer quicker but rougher effect and will choose more opaque and thicker layers, while another will choose smoothness over speed and will paint with thin nearly colorless translucent layers of paint. You can apply two, three, or hundreds of layers - it's all about what you want, how much time you want to spend, how patient you are, and what effect you need.

4. Glazing is not your ultimate technique which will make you the super-painter. It can make some things easier, but there are better techniques if you want fast results. It's pretty slow but can allow you to build up rich colors, with many subtle hues and tints.

5. There's no secret in glazing - it's just like painting with normal paints. But where you would normally use opaque paint, you use (more or less) translucent paint. That's all...

So let us move on to an example of what can be done with glazing and let's take a closer look:

That's how you would paint a transition of colors with the good old layering:

You would need to use a different color for every layer, and make each successive layer cover less and less of the miniature. Right?

Now that's what you do with glazes:

You can use one color for many layers because their increasing opacity builds up the color transition. And we achieved the same transitions as with opaque paints. See?

Soon we'll be moving to even more examples. So stay tuned!