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
The use of a scumble is the same; and both the glaze and the scumble will be painted into and over with solid color, and that again modified as much as is called for.
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
Don't glaze and scumble, but work as directly as you can.
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
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
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
As their conversation should be most prominent, the dance-melody is promptly changed from major to minor, which always gives a subduing and receding effect like "scumbling over" in painting.
From Stars of the Opera by Wagnalls, Mabel
Glazing, as well as scumbling, implies the obligation to varnish your picture.
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
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.
