A Rock Spire, Glazed in Layers
Okay. Last lesson was warm light on a slot canyon wall — getting that low sun to sit believable on stone. Today we're going vertical. Spires and hoodoos, that kind of formation. Different problem than a canyon wall. A wall is basically one plane tilted toward you. A spire is a stack of planes twisting around itself, and it's lit differently on every face.
I want to talk about glazing for this one, because a spire is where glazing actually earns its keep. Glazing just means laying a transparent wash over a dry layer to shift its color or value without disturbing what's underneath. You're not mixing on the paper. You're mixing on top of it, in thin coats, and letting each one show through the next.
Our dry air is actually good for this. Layer dries fast, you glaze again, it dries fast, you glaze again. On the wet coast people wait around for washes to open back up. Here you're basically never waiting long. I know I've said that about six times this course but it matters every single lesson we do wet-on-dry, so.
Why a spire needs layers and not detail lines
This connects to something I said back in the rock module. People want to draw the texture onto a spire — little cracks, little lines, trying to describe every ledge. That's a detail fix for a value problem. A spire reads as a spire because of how its planes shift in value and temperature as they twist away from the light source, not because you drew the striations. Get three or four glazes stacked correctly and the thing will look like stone from across the room. Add fussy lines on top of a flat spire and it still looks flat, just busier.
The actual steps
1. Block in the whole spire with one light, warm wash. Something like a diluted burnt sienna, maybe with a touch of yellow ochre. This is your base. Every part of the spire gets this, even the shadow side. Let it dry completely. Don't rush this — if you glaze onto a wash that's not fully dry you get a muddy bloom instead of a clean layer, and that's not a "fix it later" mistake, that's a start-over mistake.
2. Second glaze, cooler and slightly darker, on the side away from your light. This is where you commit to a light direction and don't waffle. Pick a side. If the light's coming from your right, the left side of the spire gets this cooler layer. I usually mix something bluish-gray for this — I genuinely couldn't tell you exact proportions, it's whatever's sitting on my palette that day, maybe a violet and a gray-blue. Let it dry again.
3. Third glaze, narrower, in the deepest crevices and the underside of any ledges. This is where the spire starts looking like it has actual structure instead of just two tones. Keep this pass small. You're not repainting the shadow side, you're deepening specific pockets of it.
4. Fourth pass if you want it: a warm accent glaze on just the topmost lit edge. Thin, almost dry-brushed. This is optional and it's easy to overdo. One pass. Walk away.
That's four thin layers instead of one thick, fussy painting. Each one dries, each one stays clean, and the color underneath keeps showing through the whole way, which is what gives a glazed spire that lit-from-within look instead of a painted-on look.
A caution here: don't try to speed this up by using a hair dryer on high right up close to force the dry time. I've scorched paper doing that, and it also tightens the sizing in a way that makes your next glaze behave strangely. Low and from a distance if you're impatient, or just paint two spires at once and work one while the other dries. That's what I actually do.
The napkin spire
I'll tell you where I actually got decent at this shape. I was planning a Needles trip with David and Brady, and I was sitting in a meeting I probably should've been paying more attention to, sketching a rock spire on a napkin just to have something to do with my hands. No water, no color, just a pencil and a napkin and half my brain on the trip. It came out better than almost anything I'd painted on real paper that whole month. Cleaner planes, better sense of the twist.
I think what happened is I wasn't precious about it. It was a napkin. Nothing to ruin. I committed to each plane because there was no reason not to. That's basically the whole intermediate leap I keep talking about — being willing to put down a stroke you can't take back. I still have that napkin in my notebook. It's held up better than some of my actual paintings, which tells you something about how much the paper matters versus how much the decision-making matters.
My opinion, and I'll say it plainly: layers make the rock read, not detail. If your spire looks flat after step 2 above, the fix is not to go add cracks. The fix is to trust the process through step 3 and 4.
Before next time
Find a photo of a hoodoo or spire — Goblin Valley photos work fine, you don't need to have been there — and rough out the plane structure in pencil before our next class. Don't paint it yet. Just find where the twist happens.