Painting Terms/Techniques

—Broken color is the use of brushstrokes or a particular pattern to set the mood or feeling of a painting.  Artists who practice this method say they “taste the painting with their eyes.”  This is a pretty bizarre description, but they are attempting to capture their subject with color relationships and value that are meant to be viewed from a distance.  From that vantage point, the subject should be fresh and lively.  It’s a contemporary technique in which simple lines on a canvas—rather than mixed, mingled, intersecting strokes—yield a subject.

—Lifting refers to the removal of paint or drawing material from the surface of artwork.  This can be done, depending on the material/medium, with an eraser, tissue, damp/stiff brush, cloth or sponge and by scraping, sanding, blotting or any other procedure in which the end result is the removal of the medium.  This technique is usually associated with watercolor and gouache.  These paints can be reconstituted with water and lifted (blotted), with the intent to remove the paint and expose the white of the paper to create a highlights.

—Dry brush painting is a more immediate style of watermedia painting and is at the opposite end of the painting scope from wet-in-wet.  Dry paper is contacted by a charged brush.  This brush is not dripping wet but barely pre-moistened. Since it holds a minimum of water when it goes into the pigment, it charges with stronger color.  The purpose of this is to create a method by which strong detail, control and precision can be achieved.  The artist builds up or mixes colors with short precise touches of the brush that blend, avoiding the appearance of pointillism.  Artists like Andrew Wyeth were famous for this method—clear, clean, near-photographic images.

—Impasto is the term used when paint is applied in a thick manner, usually with either a paint brush or a palette knife.  In some instances the artist will squeeze paint onto the surface directly from the tube.  The thick paint that is created by these applications is meant to be readily apparent and a deliberate part of the painting.  This technique is normally used to create bold textures in both oil and alkyd paints and acrylic artists’ colors.

—Grisaille is a painting technique that is done in several shades of a single color.  Often the single color is gray and used as an underpainting to be glazed over with different colors to develop a full-color effect.  In other cases, grisaille refers to an entire painting that is done with different values of a single color, e.g., light, medium and dark reds.