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
In painting The Birth of the World, 1925, he started with the background, a scumble of brush strokes and hesitations.
From Time Magazine Archive
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
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 Parkhurst, Daniel Burleigh
Scumble and glaze and paint into them, and glaze and scumble again.
From The Painter in Oil A complete treatise on the principles and technique necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors by Parkhurst, Daniel Burleigh
This is a show to see in person, to study the brushed, dripped, stained and scumbled surfaces.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 7, 2022
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
It is a field of thick, scratched white with a scumbled wedge of red ocher pushing in from the right.
From New York Times ● Sep. 6, 2018
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
"Can all the glazing and scumbling in the world," muttered he to himself, "ever advance this portrait one step towards the divine original?"
From Tales of the Wonder Club, Volume II by Huth, Alexander
By scumbling is meant rubbing the colour into the canvas, working the brush from side to side rapidly, and laying just the thinnest solid tone that will cover the surface.
From The Practice and Science of Drawing by Speed, Harold
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.
