How To: Glaze oil paint over colored pencils

Watch this fine art video tutorial to learn how to glaze oil paint over colored pencils.

"What you are seeing is a short time lapse of me layering color with illustration markers (prismacolor) and color pencils. I have discovered that using markers and color pencils is a much faster way to build a foundation for a painting (if you could still call it that).

Today, I will add a third step to my process. In less than a minute I will teach you how to glaze oil paint. Glazing is a very well known oil painting technique that gives a work of art a more life like finish. I am a mixed media artist now but the first medium that I learned in my training as an artist was oil painting. Glazing was, by far my favorite oil painting process, but it would often take months to reach the point where I could glaze because of oil paints slow drying time.

The crazy caricature of the little old lady with the gun took me less than an hour to make. Now, let me define glazing. Glazing is the act of adding transparent or translucent color to a painting. Water is a good example of transparency because you could almost perfectly see through it and candle wax is a good example of something that is translucent. Some light can shine through something that is translucent but only hints of color. You could usually tell if a color is good for glazing by looking at the tube of paint.

Most paint manufacturers put a square on the outside of the tube indicating the paints opacity. If the square is empty or half full it is a good color to use for glazing.

You can download a list of the paints that I use for glazing on my website. Just type in Glazing in the search box. One last thing before we start to glaze. I recommend a product from Windsor and Newton called Liquin for glazing. It mixes very well with the wax from the color pencils. "

--Merrill Kazanjian