Glazing to deepen a color without mixing
Okay. Last lesson was the rhythm — first layer, dry, second layer, dry. You've got the pattern down. This lesson is what that pattern is actually for, which is glazing.
Glazing sounds fancy. It's not. It just means you lay down a wash of color, let it dry all the way, and then lay a second wash of the same color over the top of some or all of it. That's it. You're not mixing anything on the palette. You're stacking transparent layers on the paper and letting them add up.
Here's why you'd bother. If you want a darker blue, your instinct is to load more pigment into your water and mix a darker blue. That works, but it also flattens it out. It looks like one note played louder. Glazing gives you a blue with depth to it, because light is passing through two thin layers of paint instead of bouncing off one thick one. You can actually see this if you hold a glazed swatch up to a window. There's a glow underneath it that a single heavy mix doesn't have.
What you need
Same six colors, round and flat brush, water, paper. Nothing new to buy, which I like, because I'm still mildly against people buying more supplies than they need before they know what they're doing with the ones they've got.
Use your cheap paper for this one too. You're going to do this wrong a few times before it clicks, and cheap paper doesn't care.
The steps
1. Paint a flat wash. Pick one color. Mix a medium-value puddle, not too watery, not too heavy. Lay down a flat wash in a square, maybe three inches by three inches. You know this move already.
2. Let it dry. All the way. This is the part people skip and it's the part that matters most. Not "dry to the touch," not "mostly dry." Bone dry. In our air that usually doesn't take long, ten, fifteen minutes for a wash this size, faster if your swamp cooler or furnace fan is running. But go touch it with the back of your finger before you move on. If there's any coolness or give to it, it's still wet underneath even if the surface looks done.
3. Paint the second layer over the top. Same color, same consistency, same brush strokes, left to right or top to bottom, whichever way you went the first time. Don't scrub. Don't go back over a spot twice trying to "fix" it. Lay it down once and leave it alone.
4. Let that dry too, and look at what you've got. You'll see it's darker, obviously, but if you did it right you'll also see it's not muddy. It should still feel like glass over glass. Clean and layered, not stirred together.
If it looks muddy instead of deep, that's almost always because layer one wasn't fully dry, or because you scrubbed the brush around on layer two instead of laying it down and stepping away. Both are fixable. Just slow down the drying step next time.
The mistake that taught me the most
I left a wet wash on the kitchen counter once because I got pulled away, and Paisley set her sippy cup right down in the middle of it. I came back expecting to be annoyed, and I was, for about ten seconds. But the ring the cup left behind dried into this soft, perfect circle, lighter in the middle, a touch darker at the edge where the water pooled and pushed pigment outward as it dried.
That's glazing's cousin, honestly, minus the sippy cup. Water sitting on top of a wash for a while, drying unevenly, leaves an edge. It taught me that "fully dry" isn't a formality I'm supposed to observe out of politeness. Water left on the surface for any length of time is going to do something, whether I meant it to or not. Sometimes that something is a happy accident. Sometimes it's a ring stain you didn't want in the middle of a sky. Glazing on purpose just means you're choosing when and where that happens instead of a toddler choosing it for you.
I liked mine better with the ring, for what it's worth. Kept it anyway.
Try this today
Take your gray-brown foothill mix from a couple lessons back. Do a flat wash, dry it fully, glaze over just the bottom third with a second layer. You should end up with a value that reads like foreground shadow at the bottom, lighter foothill up top, from one single color. No mixing a "darker" version needed. The paper's doing the work if you let it.
Before next time: try a two-layer glaze on one color of your choice and pay attention to how long "fully dry" actually takes in your kitchen versus what a tutorial video tells you. That number is the one you actually need to know.