Adepticon 2013 – Day 4 – Glazing

Glazing was a good class. I didn’t learn a whole lot, for reasons we’ll get into, but I left feeling energized, which was a feat considering the absolute exhaustion I went into the class with!

I can’t remember or Google the teacher’s name, but he was originally a student of Mathieu Fontaine, whom I’ve written about before. “Glazing”, it turns out, is a technique I’ve learned already. Start with a mid-tone and apply successive layers of darker mixes to the shaded portion of an area, layers of lighter mixes to the highlighted area. Nothing new there.

What was new, was that I’d played with a bunch of this stuff and looked into different ways of applying the methods Mathieu taught. So I asked a bunch of questions. I asked about how James Wappel does his stuff, I asked about using the artists matte medium as a pigment thinner and generally just had the confidence to have a conversation about this stuff.

The downside…they have no idea how Wappel does what he does, and they recommend against the matte medium.

One thing I really did re-learn, is that I really should figure out how to include a wet palette into my painting workflow. I learned it with Fontaine, but neglected it, and it’s really kind of useful to do. >.<

I think it was mostly invigorating because I felt like I was a part of the conversation. Like I could paint something, and potentially be able to speak knowledgeably about how and why I did what I did. Like I could put something together that would look decent in that competition shelving out front.

I’m still going to use the medium, because I’ve loved what I’ve done with it so far. 😛

 

Edit: I believe that the teacher was Alex Akers. He runs Battleroad Games and his (defunct) hobby blog is at http://akersminis.blogspot.ca/.