How to Use Glazing and Scumbling in a Floral Oil Painting
- Elena Valerie
- Jun 28
- 10 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
In my recent art class on the Gold Coast, we took a deep dive into the layered painting techniques that have been used by master painters for centuries. This blog post documents the full process we explored together — from grisaille underpainting to scumbling, glazing in Oil painting, and finishing with opaque colour.
We applied each step while working on a Magnolia painting, learning how to build depth, light, and subtlety into our work. This approach helped us better understand how pigments behave when layered — and how each technique contributes to the final effect. You'll also find photos of different stages of the painting process from our class, offering visual guidance alongside the step-by-step explanations. If you’re curious about traditional oil methods or looking to refine your own process, this post offers a complete guide based on our hands-on classroom experience.
🎨 PART 1 - Beginning with Grisaille – Building Light and Form First
Before adding any colour to our magnolia paintings, we started with a classical underpainting technique called grisaille. This method is all about painting in a single neutral tone to focus on light, shadow, and form.
🖤 What is Grisaille?
The word grisaille comes from the French gris, meaning “gray.” It’s a traditional painting approach that uses just one colour—typically a grey or brown tone—to develop the values in a composition. This method dates back to medieval and Renaissance times, when artists used it to imitate sculpture, build strong value foundations, or prepare a painting for colour glazes.
Grisaille is still incredibly useful today. By separating value from colour, it allows you to clearly see the structure of your subject, helping you build form and depth before layering on paint.
🖌 Our Grisaille Process in Class
In our recent Gold Coast art class, we used this technique as the first stage of our magnolia painting. Here's how we approached it:
Step 1: Lightly Toned Canvas
We began by toning our canvases with a very thin wash of raw umber mixed with solvent, just enough to break up the white and give us a warm, neutral base.
Step 2: Painting the Darks
Once our drawing was transferred to the surface, we used raw umber to block in the darkest areas. This helped us quickly establish the light and shadow structure of the composition.
Step 3: Adding Halftones
Still in the same session, we moved into modelling the midtones. By adjusting the amount of Liquin in the mix, we created softer, lighter values. Using a dry brush, we gently brushed in the transitions between the shadows and lighter areas, adding a sense of roundness and form. It gave the magnolia petals shape and life, even before colour was applied.
🎨 Why Raw Umber?
We used raw umber because it’s a cool, earthy brown that dries quickly and doesn’t overpower future layers of colour. It’s perfect for grisaille.
If you’re considering a warmer base, burnt umber—which has a more reddish tone—can be used instead. It’s great when you want warmth in your shadows, but for this project, raw umber helped keep the tone neutral and soft, which suits the delicacy of magnolia petals.
This stage gave everyone a strong foundation to build on. Grisaille is a beautiful way to learn how light works in painting, and it sets the stage for the more expressive colour techniques that follow—like glazing and scumbling, which we explored in the next part of the painting.
🌸 PART 2: Scumbling – Building Light and Texture
With the underpainting dry, the next phase involves applying lighter tones to develop form and luminosity. This is achieved through scumbling, a technique where a thin, opaque or semi-opaque layer of lighter paint is applied over a darker, dry layer. Unlike glazing, which uses transparent layers, scumbling allows for a more textured and nuanced application, enhancing the depth and realism of the subject.
The term "scumble" originates from the 17th-century word "scum," meaning "to skim," reflecting the light, skimming application of paint over the surface.
Historically, artists like Rembrandt and Turner employed scumbling to achieve atmospheric effects and subtle transitions in their paintings. In our class, we utilized this technique to enhance the luminosity and dimensionality of the magnolia petals.
🖌️ Technique Overview
Establish Highlights: Begin by identifying the brightest areas of your subject. Apply a thick layer of white oil paint to these regions to create a strong contrast against the underpainting.
Adjust Paint Consistency: To achieve the desired thickness and texture, consider incorporating a chalk-based medium. This addition can enhance the paint's body, allowing for more pronounced brushstrokes and a tactile quality in the highlights.
Blend and Model: Use a soft, synthetic sable brush to lay down the paint smoothly, ensuring controlled application. For areas requiring more texture, switch to a bristle brush, which can impart a varied, expressive quality to the strokes.
Create Depth: Apply the paint more thickly around the edges of forms to emphasize their solidity, while keeping the interior areas thinner and more transparent. This variation in opacity contributes to a sense of depth and dimensionality.
Maintain Cleanliness: If you're using lead white, it's important to handle it with care. Wear gloves to avoid direct contact with your skin
🎨 Materials Needed
White Oil Paint Options:
Lead White: Known for its flexibility and fast-drying properties.
or
Tinting White by Langridge: A blend designed for subtle lightening without overpowering colours.
Mixture of Titanium and Zinc White: Combines the opacity of titanium with the transparency of zinc for balanced highlights.
Medium:
Rublev Velázquez Medium: A paste medium made of finely ground calcite in bodied linseed oil. It extends paint and forms impastos while making the paint 'longer' or more stringy, allowing for fine detail and thick applications. This medium slightly increases the transparency of colours, enabling greater control over tints without altering the colour temperature. It can be thinned with solvent or oil and is solvent-free.
Brushes:
Soft synthetic sable brushes for smooth application.
Bristle brushes for textured effects.
Optional Additive:
Chalk-based medium to enhance paint body and texture.
By carefully applying these techniques and materials, you can achieve a luminous and textured effect in your painting, bringing your subject to life with depth and realism.
🎨 PART 3: Glazing in Oil Painting: Adding Colour and Depth
What Is Glazing?
Glazing is a painting technique where you apply a thin, see-through layer of oil paint over a dry layer underneath. The idea is to let light pass through the transparent colour and bounce off the layers below, creating a luminous, glowing effect that adds richness and depth.
This method has been used by artists for centuries—especially during the Renaissance and Baroque periods—by painters like Titian and Vermeer. They used multiple layers of glazes to build up complex colours and soft transitions of light and shadow. Rather than mixing everything on the palette, they stacked layers of pure colour, allowing the eye to mix them visually.
In modern practice, glazing is a powerful way to shift tones, add warmth or coolness, or create subtle effects that are hard to achieve with just direct painting. It works best when applied over a fully dry underpainting, and it’s especially effective when combined with other traditional techniques like grisaille and scumbling.
Glazing in the Magnolia Painting
At this stage of the painting, the fully dry scumbled lead white layer serves as the foundation for glazing. This approach is highly efficient, as it allows for the straightforward application of colour over pre-established values and forms.
It's almost like colouring in a colouring book. With the values already determined through the umber underpainting and the highlights established with lead white, applying transparent colours becomes a matter of enhancing the existing structure.
Understanding Transparent Colours
Transparent pigments are crucial for effective glazing in oil painting. These pigments, when applied thinly, allow the underlying layers to show through, contributing to the painting's depth and luminosity.
While glazing often involves darker colours, lighter hues like yellow ochre can also be used transparently. For instance, glazing with yellow ochre over the magnolia petals imparts a warm, golden glow, enriching the overall colour harmony.
Building the Painting's Structure
This layered approach may seem counterintuitive, as it involves painting over previous layers. However, each layer serves as a guide for the next, contributing to the painting's complexity and realism.
By starting with a warm, glowing underpainting, subsequent layers build upon this foundation, allowing subtle nuances to emerge and enhancing the painting's depth and richness.
Creating Depth Through Glazing
Glazing also plays a pivotal role in establishing spatial relationships within the painting. By applying darker, transparent glazes to background elements, such as green leaves, these areas recede, creating a sense of depth. Conversely, lighter, more textured applications in the foreground, like the magnolia petals, bring these elements forward.
This technique effectively manipulates the viewer's perception, guiding the eye through the composition and enhancing the three-dimensional illusion.
By incorporating glazing into your painting process, you can achieve a remarkable depth and luminosity, bringing your magnolia painting to life with vibrant colour and intricate detail.
If you're new to glazing in oil painting, you might want to revisit our earlier post on the ribbon colour chart exercise, where we first explored this technique step-by-step. Check it out here.
🎨 PART 4 - Applying Opaque Colour: Refining the Magnolia
At this stage, the painting may still look a bit rough and unfinished — this is what many artists refer to as the “ugly stage.” It can be the most difficult moment psychologically, where everything has been established, but the results don’t look refined just yet. You’ve already invested so much effort, so the key here is to keep showing up and trust the process. This is the point where things begin to come together — and rather quickly.
🧰 Materials Used
Oil paints:
Ultramarine Blue
Yellow Ochre
Alizarin Crimson
Brushes:
Soft synthetic sable brushes
Bristle brushes for texture
Mediums:
Rublev Velázquez Medium – a long, stringy impasto medium great for subtle texture and layering
Slow-Drying Blending Medium – a 50/50 mix of linseed oil and solvent, used to extend drying time and allow for soft blending in delicate areas
🖌️ The Process
1. Mixing Colour Strings
We limited our palette to just three colours — Ultramarine Blue, Yellow Ochre, and Alizarin Crimson — to create harmonious, controlled results. Strings of colour were pre-mixed in lighter tonal values to reflect the delicate translucency of the magnolia petals and to make painting easier.
Spend time at the beginning of your session mixing puddles of light, mid, and dark values. These aren't final mixes — you'll adjust them on the brush as you go.
2. Testing and Adjusting with the Brush
It’s hard to judge colour only on the palette, especially when you’re working with subtle shifts in tone. Constantly test with your brush, then modify the mix on the fly. If it’s too orange, add more red. If it’s too red, shift it with yellow. If the value needs changing, adjust with white or a touch of dark.
3. Opaque Application
This isn’t glazing or scumbling — this is direct, opaque painting. Use your colour strings to refine the forms, now working opaquely to achieve the final look. You're using all of the underpainting — the grisaille, the scumbled whites, and any glazes — as a guide for your final choices.
Establish a broader range of warms and cools, capturing the richness of the magnolia’s colour transitions.
4. Understanding Translucency in Flowers
Magnolia petals, like many flowers, are quite translucent. Even their shadow areas remain fairly light. Unlike opaque objects that block the light and cast deep shadows, translucent petals allow light to pass through — shifting both value and colour. This results in soft, glowing shadows that can appear warm or cool, depending on the light.
Think about each petal in terms of both value (light vs dark) and temperature (warm vs cool).In the shadows, ask: is it more violet or blue? In the lights: is it leaning more yellow or pink?
5. Embracing the Shift from “Ugly” to Beautiful
This is the moment where the painting starts to transform — often dramatically. After just an hour or so of working opaquely, it may shift from uncertain and flat to rich, beautiful, and full of life. There’s always that moment of doubt, but this layered approach — built with glazing, scumbling, and opaque colour — is designed to support you in getting past that stage.
🌸 Final Touches: Finishing with Intention
As we approached the final stage of our magnolia painting, the focus shifted to subtle refinements — adjusting the balance between warm and cool tones, softening edges, and deepening the shadows to create that soft, glowing transition into the background.
🎯 Tip: If you squint your eyes, you’ll notice how some part side of the magnolia gently rolls into shadow while still maintaining a luminous feel. This is where detail work matters most — small adjustments in tone and temperature can dramatically enhance depth and realism.
At this point in the process, many artists experience what’s known as the "ugly stage". You’ve put in weeks of work, yet it still doesn’t feel quite right. This is totally normal.
💡 Encouragement: Trust your foundation. This is when things can shift quickly — sometimes in just an hour of focused work, your painting will suddenly come to life.
💬 Artist Insight
Not everyone enjoys the same stage of the painting process. Some love the excitement of a fresh start, others — like me — find peace in the final stages of refining. The key is recognising which parts feel challenging and leaning into them occasionally to grow.
✨ Challenge yourself: If you usually rush to finish or abandon a painting early, try sticking with the final details on your next one. You may be surprised how satisfying the results can be.
🎨 A Lifelong Practice
Every painting is not just about what you already know — it’s a reflection of what you’re currently learning. That’s what makes painting so rewarding. There’s always something new to explore, a new challenge to overcome, and a new level of expression waiting to unfold.
I hope following along with this magnolia painting gave you a glimpse into our Art Class studio practice — and maybe inspired you to push a little further in your own work too. The joy of painting lies not just in the finished piece, but in the journey of creating it.
📍 Related Post
Want to deepen your understanding of glazing and scumbling? Take a look at our ribbon colour chart blog post for another hands-on study using these classical techniques.
Enjoyed this? 🎨 Find more about our regular Gold Coast art classes to try these techniques yourself!
