Glazing is a great technique for creating rich luminous color that involves building up thin transparent layers of paint. Glazes are not simply oil colors thinned with turpentine, but a mixture of paint and a given medium that determines the finish and feel of a painting. Many options are available today from glossy and transparent linseed oil mixtures to a slightly less lusterous, but quick drying alkyd medium.

Get everything you need for underpainting & glazing from UWeb.

Here are a few tips for glazing as well as recipes for useful glazing mediums.

1. Be familiar with the opacity of your palette. Take some time to get to know which colors are transparent, semi-transparent or opaque. Transparent colors will work well for building up rich color through glazing, while opaque colors are best employed in base layers and underpaintings.

2. Choose your surface wisely. Glazing works best on a smooth, flat surface, most Renaissance painters chose to work on panels. A wide range of panels and boards are available today.

3. Go with a soft brush. Glazes are meant to be smooth and free of brush stokes so a soft brush with rounded edges will prevent visible brush marks. Marks can be eliminated by gently going over the visible strokes with a hake or fan brush.

4. Bring it all together. You can unify an entire painting or a few key areas by applying a final glaze over the entire surface.

5. Most importantly... Be patient! Allow your glazes to dry before adding a new layer. Working on a wet glaze will cause the layers to muddle and the qualities you are trying to achieve will be lost. If you want to speed the process choose an alkyd medium with a fast drying time over a stand oil medium.

Here are a two recipes for glazing mediums:

All Purpose Lean Painting & Glazing Medium
1 Part Utrecht Stand Oil
1 Part Damar Varnish
5 Parts Gum Turpentine

Old World Glazing Medium
9 Parts Damar Varnish
9 Parts Turpentine
4 Parts Stand Oil
2 Parts Venice Turpentine

A time-honored oil painting technique for creating rich luminous color and preventing your colors from gettting muddled is the process of underpainting and glazing. Applying thin transparent layers of oil color (or glazes) over an underpainting can add depth and brighten the overall work.

There are many options for the style of underpainting you can choose from  and can spend many years studying the styles and effects they produce, as well as a number of ways to create a glaze (read more on mixing glazes here), but in this post we will focus on two methods, Verdaccio and Grisaille. Both methods can be used to create a monochromatic version of your painting that will establish the overall value and create a sense of three dimensional space.

"Verdaccio" is the Italian name for the mixture of Mars Black and Yellow Ochre that creates the cool greenish gray tones used in the method. The Verdaccio method creates an excellent underpainting for skin tones and can be employed to create a great sense of realism. Once the monochromatic version is complete a series of glazes is layed over top to build a sense of light and color. Allowing the layers of glazes to dry in between prevents your colors from muddling and allows the underpainting to show through. Some paintings (including the Sistine Chapel) leave architectural or background elements in the original verdaccio underpainting, allowing the glazed figures or objects to appear even more luminous.

In process, Grisaille is similar to Verdaccio, but employs a neutral or warm gray to create the underpainting and is often used to show objects in relief. Beyond it's use as an underpainting technique, it was also used as a model for an engravers to work from and purely for the sake of decoration on walls and doors. A Grisaille underpainting serves as an excellent teaching tool to show the form and dimension that can be achieved with a single hue.

Once your underpainting is complete a series of glazes are used to tint or modify the layers beneath. Layering allows for subsequent details and tones to be added over exisiting details and makes the surface more luminous. This can be a long process, as each layer must dry before adding another, but the results are well worth the investment of time.

Get everything you need for underpainting & glazing from UWeb.

Click here for tips on glazing.

Tereza Matos Hazelton was born in Brazil in the Northeastern State of Ceará and came to the United States in l965. She developed her love of art as a child, painting the local seascapes and fishermen in her home city. She then expanded her apprenticeship at the Academy of Art in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1979, where her love and talent for reproducing the human figure grew and took shape. At the Academy of Art, she learned how to utilize the 'old masters' techniques of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Velazquez, and Rembrandt, and now uses these techniques to reproduce ‘old masters’ paintings and also her own compositions. She has developed a unique talent for portraiture painting of the human form and shape.

Tereza follows Albert Munsel's method for color identification vocabulary when mixing colors, and to reduce the color intensity these are mixed with corresponding gray values. For portrait underpainting, she follows the Verdaccio method taught by Leonardo da Vinci. For outdoor scenes and painting of animals she follows the Grisaille and blue gray under painting method as taught by the French school.

Tereza has been teaching her craft for over ten years both nationally and internationally. She has given a series of seminars in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) and in her home city of Fortaleza, Ceará (Brazil), where she attracted over 100 students. Her workshops have been hosted in Brazil and Venezuela and she is among one of the few artists who have been given permission to teach inside the walls of the Louvre and of the Prado. In October 2000, Tereza took 10 of her students to the Louvre, Paris to work on reproducing the ‘old masters‘ of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

You can see more of Tereza's work here.