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Glite Dictionary
🌾 Shrubby plants 🎨 Painting texture 🧴 Skin exfoliating brush 🎨 To paint roughly
to dry brush

to dry brush

4.9
To use very little paint to make a rough, scratchy texture on a surface
  • phrasal verb
  • Specialized
translation icon : pintar con pincel seco
  • For the best effect, remember to dry brush in sweeping strokes to create depth.

Well, wait till you see, because you can dry brush this on and then just get like a little bit of tone.

Examples

  • We used the black paint to dry brush every other fence slat.

    Blog text (12)

  • I then dry brushed them with Old White.

    Blog text (28)

  • Do you think that I can dry brush more than like a week?

  • Well, wait till you see, because you can dry brush this on and then just get like a little bit of tone.

    Tati

  • So you're you're meant to always dry brush towards your heart.

  • You can achieve a great texture by dry brushing over the base coat with a light hand.

  • When you dry brush the canvas with a light color, it will enhance the details below.

How Textured

to dry brush
  • Specialized
4.9
to stick on
1 3.8
scumble
  • Specialized
9.9
wash
  • Specialized
10 6.7
to glaze
33 4.2

Surface Forms

dry brush infinitive
dry brushed past
dry brushed past participle
dry brushing present participle
dry brushes third person singular

Morphology

dry + brush

The meaning is directly compositional: 'dry' (lacking moisture or much paint) combined with 'brush' (the action or tool used to apply paint) yields the sense of applying paint with a barely-wet brush to create texture. This is a literal, productively built phrase following normal adjective+verb/tool patterns, so a B1 learner who knows the relevant senses of the constituents will readily infer the meaning.

Etymology

Dry brush as a verb comes from the action of using a dry brush with very little paint or water to lightly drag across a surface so the top parts catch the paint. So to 'dry brush' means to apply paint in thin, textured strokes.