Learning to See

Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists

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Spring Flowers and Still Life Workshop – Session Four

Session four will be here on:

Tuesday 6th April

at

6PM UK time (10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern)

Check your timezone here

What we’ll be doing

Now we’ve practised our for drawing, our values and also translating value into colour, it’s time to move forward into our first complete subject.

This will be an alla prima (single session) painting, and we’ll be concentrating on simplification of form, values and colour.

The session will probably be 2.5 to 3 hours, and we’ll be aiming to have the painting near to finished by that point.

Of course, if you want to, you’ll be able to let it dry and then work more sessions on it. But the main focus of this session is getting a strong start for an alla prima painting.

The main difference with this subject is that we have the whole space to paint, instead of just the flowers, and we’ll also be painting glass!

Don’t worry too much about the glass. I’ll be showing you an approach to simplifying that too by painting what you can see through the glass rather than the glass itself!

We won’t be aiming for a high level of finish all over, the strategy for alla prima painting is to convey the subject in total in a simplified way, then home in a few selected areas for more finish. Leaving things brushy can be a challenge in itself!

What you’ll need

Your value scale

Surface: a 10 x 8 inch panel or similar

Brushes: As before, a selection of synthetic flats around a half inch. You might want a couple of large-ish hog filbets for the background and possibly a small round or two for details.

Palette knife (for mixing)

Pallete:

  • titanium white
  • bright yellow lake/cadmium yellow lemon
  • cadmium yellow
  • yellow ochre
  • green gold
  • transparent red oxide
  • raw umber
  • ivory black
  • a pthalo green

Medium: Linseed oil and a solvent

Reference photos

photo one (with a grid)

photo two (without a grid)

photo three (value only)

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