Applying paint to create effects

When begining a painting artists, including pet portrait painters, will embrace many techniques to produce different visual effects on the canvas. Many of these techniques have been used by artists for centuries and have particular terms to describe them. The following listing outlines a few of these terms and the principles upon which they’re based.

Body Colour
‘Body colour’ is used to describe paint that has been given body so that it is, effectively, opaque in appearance, usually attained by adding white. But this term is also used to refer to the application of thick dense layers of paint. It is possibly the simplest means of applying paint as it does not make use of underlying layers. Colours and tones are simply mixed and set down as they are intended to be seen.

Scumbling
To scumble is to drag paint over the support in a half-covering fashion, so that it leaves irregular traces of the colour from the underlying layer or ground to show through. Scumbles are sometimes created as a deep layer, like impasto, or quite thinly to produce a veil-like effect. This technique is usually applied using a brush, though a palette knife can also be used.

Frottie
Frottie is a term used to describe the thin covering of a transparent or semi-transparent layer of colour. More accurately, this term is used to identify the semi-transparent paint that is somewhere between body colour and glazes. The frottie is mostly used in traditional techniques, where it may occur in delicate passages of the underpainting or as a finishing layer over a well developed dead-colouring. In both cases, it retains the overall character of whatever lies beneath it.

Scraping back
First, an area of wet paint is laid down over a dry layer, whilst it is still wet, it is then removed using the edge of a palette knife so that small traces of the wet layer remain. If used with transparent colours the result can resemble a wash, if body colour is used, the effect is like a scumble.

Rubbing
This is a term that is simply used to describe the application of paint using the fingers. It’s worth taking great care when using this technique as some paints are toxic. However, it does have it’s benefits, as no other method can offer you even, controlled and uniformly thin layers of paint.

Glazing
Using it’s precise definition, a glaze is a layer of transparent colour, whose body is derived from it’s medium, resulting in great depth and intensity of colour. A glaze is the complete opposite to body colour, as it has no covering power at all, only colouring power. Glazes have the propensity to make objects appear closer, something that can be used to create the illusion of distance.

Wash
A wash is a thin and extremely fluid application of colour made by diluting paint to excess with a suitable thinner. Washes can be confused with glazes, but there are two important differences. In a wash, no extra medium is added, resulting in a very lean paint film. In addition, although a wash tends to be transparent, it doesn’t have to be, opaque colour can be applied as a wash.

Impasto
Impasto refers to the application of thick paint that stands clear of the painting surface. It is ordinarily used to provide texture and form to the colour. Heavy Impasto’s tend to be more stable if they are built up in layers.

Dabbing
This is the technique of applying random texture effects using a textured object, this is normally a small piece of cloth or sponge.

Pulling
This really is the opposite of dabbing and is similar to scraping back. Wet paint is applied to the painting and promptly removed using an absorbent material. The main difference with this technique to scraping is that the paint is ‘lifted’ which avoids any horizontal movement within the paint marks.

Blending
This refers to the mixing of adjacent wet colour to obliterate any hard edges. Blending fans, specifically designed for the job, are available to the artist, though any soft brush with a broad head will do the job.

Brush marks
Brush marks, or for that matter knife marks, can be introduced deliberately to add interest or expression to a painting. Well placed brush marks can be the testimony of a skilled artist, they can create striking effects with the minimum of effort.

Scoring
As with scraping back, this method involves removing of freshly applied wet paint. Though in the case of scoring, tools are used to create lines and patterns in the paint, rather than a more wholesale removal as in scrapping back.