scumble
Americanverb (used with object)
noun
-
the act or technique of scumbling.
-
the effect produced by this technique.
verb
noun
-
the upper layer of colour applied in this way
-
the technique or effects of scumbling
Etymology
Origin of scumble
1790–1800; perhaps equivalent to scum (v.) + -le, with intrusive b
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Up close, you can see how Rembrandt’s application of wet paint over dry creates a texture, or scumble, uncannily close to human skin, with its pores and subcutaneous blood vessels.
From Washington Post
When doing a portrait, he contrived a pose that suited his view; if hands diverted attention from face, he would magisterially scumble them over, obliterating the knuckles without any sense of embarrassment.
From Time Magazine Archive
In painting The Birth of the World, 1925, he started with the background, a scumble of brush strokes and hesitations.
From Time Magazine Archive
Too much scumbling will make a picture vague and soft, and after a scumble it is best to paint into it with firm color to avoid this.
From The Painter in Oil A complete treatise on the principles and technique necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
A scumble is rubbed on, and is never pure transparent color.
From The Painter in Oil A complete treatise on the principles and technique necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
It’s actually a wonderfully scumbled scene of colorful fishing boats perched on the shore waiting for the turbulent sea to calm down.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 30, 2021
In a moody, scumbled photograph called “ ‘Erasure’—The Beginning of Conquest and Destruction, Native America Loses the European Cultural Battle,” Cooper shows the beach in Veracruz where Cortés commenced his Aztec campaign.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 30, 2019
Backgrounds are often so light that you can see the weave of the linen underneath; faces are reworked carelessly, and the edges between the figures and backgrounds become scumbled.
From New York Times ● May 11, 2017
Like maps made up of scraped and scumbled surfaces, they provide islands of respite from the pyrotechnics that dominate “Wild Thing.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 4, 2016
The moon was brilliant, the path a track of scumbled footprints in the snow, the air cutting and cold.
From "The Amber Spyglass" by Philip Pullman
Rubbing out, scraping away, scumbling, glazing, trickling, thinning, he altered the picture according to his idiosyncratic logic.
From New York Times ● Sep. 2, 2021
Delvin and his kind were merely scumbling through it.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 2, 2016
The scumbling is incredibly difficult to copy, the different colours peeping through the layers – nightmare.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 22, 2013
False Tone.—This is not to be attained by painting the picture regardless of color relations, and then glazing or scumbling some color all over the whole.
From The Painter in Oil A complete treatise on the principles and technique necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
A faint scumbling, which poets might have described as the mists of youth's Aurora, endowed the face with a soothing indefinitude.
From Love's Usuries by Louis Creswicke
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
