Drawing lessons - illustrated lesson notes for teachers and students

Likely to Scumble

6-8 LIKELY TO SCUMBLE

As the judge remarked about my life. ‘Its like paint ... parts are opaque, parts transparent, and parts

somewhere in between, according to how much light is able to pass through the tiny particles of your

credibility.’

But he was right about the paint. It can be opaque, transparent, and somewhere in between, according to how

much light is able to pass throught the tiny particles of pigment. Transparent pigments are like tiny colored

crystals, whereas opaque pigments are like little colored (or white) rocks through which light does not pass.

Example... Broken china or coal.(opaque) rubies, crushed colored glass.(transparent) Opaque paint reflects

light directly from the surface; transparent paint allows light to penetrate beneath the surface,

Opaque paints (siennas, umbers, whites, ochres, and most earth colors generally) give a more convincing

illusion of distance, especially when juxtaposed with a foreground which includes transparent passages for

the darker darks.

The student might think that in this painting (ABOVE) I used transparent paint for the sky and opaque paint

for the foreground... the sea. The reverse is the case. I built up many passages of transparent glazes to create

the depth of the foreground waves. The sky is done in s few earth color scumbles (great word - sounds like

something left after a very high tide or an epithet used to describe the neighbour’s chidren) anyway the

'scumbles' created the milky distance look I desired in the sky. With this understanding, it becomes apparent

that transparent paint allows for the deepest darks, because the light does not bounce off the surface, but

penetrates deeper before being reflected out to our eyes.

A scumble is a thin application of a paint whose basic nature is to be opaque but which is rendered

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