🖌️ Painting -

Glazing

Glaze = a paint meant to tint the whole applied surface evenly. Glazing is "applying a thin paint layer evenly on an area to change its color". You thin down your paint a lot and then apply only very thin layers. Or buy ready-made glaze paints.

Much like washing, but you must have more control where you apply it. You can manually paint glazes into crevices, but you generally use them differently compared to a wash. Glazes are also frequently applied to subsections like "top-half" or "lower-half" to increase visual variety.

You can glaze with any paint, including washes.

Glazes are better in creating shadows than creating highlights. Creating white with transparent paints is hard.

Try underpainting. One neat trick is to first shade and highlight with black, gray and white colors and then apply thin glaze layers to apply color.

Dark pigments make better glazes than light pigments. That is how pigments work.

Inks are excellent for glazing. They are much more transparent meaning that any dark colors will stay dark and not get colored by the glaze. Thin the ink a lot with water or a glaze medium though.

Airbrush glazing is also a thing, and it is a lot faster but with less control. E.g., giving a hint of red to elbow to make it seem slightly bruised or apply a stripe of shine on metal.