scumble

American  

[skuhm-buhl] / ˈskʌm bəl /

verb (used with object)

scumbled, scumbling

1. to soften (the color or tone of a painted area) by overlaying parts with opaque or semiopaque color applied thinly and lightly with an almost dry brush.

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noun

1. the act or technique of scumbling.

2. the effect produced by this technique.

scumble British  

/ ˈskʌmbəl /

verb

1. (in painting and drawing) to soften or blend (an outline or colour) with an upper coat of opaque colour, applied very thinly

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noun

1. the upper layer of colour applied in this way

2. the technique or effects of scumbling

Etymology

Origin of scumble

1790–1800; perhaps equivalent to scum (v.) + -le, with intrusive b

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

scumble scumbled scumbling

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

In his latest stage he hides all sharpness in a sort of scumble or haze.

From The Venetian School of Painting by Evelyn March Phillipps

The scumble may be used with the richer and darker colors, too, to modify towards richness the tone of parts of the picture, or to darken the value.

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

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

There is none of the scumbling and glazing and re-working so common in the English portraits of the time.

From McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 by Various

In oil painting white lead is essential in the ground, in dead colouring, in the formation of tints of all colours, and in scumbling, either alone or mixed with other pigments.

From Field's Chromatography or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists by Thomas Salter

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