PAINT TIP: Painting Translucence

Been on a hot streak as of late and feeling so honoured to have been informed I've exerted so much artistic influence over my peers (I do have an effect on people!) I wanted to impart a bit of wisdom to those who have embarked on their own personal journey in the world of painting. My late high school art and philosophy teacher, Doug Moore (scroll way back to find out more) taught me about this and today I share it with you.

Today's lesson is painting translucence. In the photoshop world I would call it the opacity tool. In the paint world it is called the medium. Purchasable at any art supply store, it is a thick, sorta whitish, sorta clear substance that comes in a bottle. I prefer the matte one over glossy just because it mixes well with my matte acrylic paints. 

Here is what you can do with it. Below is a bubble, although there are probably? plenty of YouTube videos that may teach you how to do this, this is my first exercise. Paint a bubble. Below I have painted the background first, including the pattern. I then took a white and with a tiny paint brush, painted the wobbly circular, contour outline of the bubble. Next, I mixed just a little bit of white into the medium and with a larger brush, painted in a thin layer of translucent white in the white circle. I used layers of different amounts of white in the medium to make some parts of the bubble look more white than others. This gave my bubble a more shiny, round look.

Taking it a few steps further, medium is great for painting skin. Skin is not flat, it does not contain of just 1 colour or 2 but several! Skin consists of many, many different tones. I thinned each one out with medium and painted them in layers. Skin has blue veins and red arteries and freckles and folds and dips and curves and moles and various gradients of different tones and shades. Mixing different colours with medium aids this translucent quality, mimicking the way a pink or brown skin overlaps blue veins for example, and all that is underneath.

Life is multidimensional, sometimes simplistic but mostly complicated. Our feelings contain a multitude of concerns, a vast spectrum of depth, an array of colours, tones and patterns, hopefully you will find this bit of knowledge useful in capturing all that, much luck!