Glazing (Painting)

Glazing is an oil painting technique in which a thin, transparent or semi-transparent layer of paint, diluted with a binding medium, is applied over a fully dried underlying layer of paint, so that light passes through the glaze, reflects off the layer beneath, and passes back through the glaze a second time, producing a depth and luminosity of color that a single opaque layer of paint cannot achieve on its own. Because each glaze must dry before the next is applied, building up color through repeated glazes is a slow, deliberate process, historically associated with the old masters of Northern European and Italian Renaissance painting, who used it to render skin tones, drapery and atmospheric depth with great subtlety. Successive glazes of different colors can also be layered over one another to produce optical color mixtures unavailable by physically mixing the same pigments together on a palette.