This project is based on the ‘alla prima’ method which means that the painting is completed all at once – in a single sitting before the paint dries.
Following on from Part 2, here are a few suggestion for carrying on your painting:
- Now that all the major shapes and colours are established, you can begin adding details and blendings to create softer edges.
- You can use a dry brush to soften transitions where necessary, this can be helpful if you want to make blend brush strokes together.
- You don’t want things getting muddy so you need to clean your brushes regularly with your thinner.
- You can start using much smaller brushes. This will allow you to add more subtle textures and fine lines where necessary.
- You can alter colours and values by painting into the wet paint. For example – if you need to shift the hue of a green to be more blue just paint a little bit of blue into the green on the painting. This saves mixing lots of new colours and/or overloading the paint surface.
- To finish, make sure that you have reinforced the darks and lights sufficiently. It is common for the lightest whites and darkest black to become a bit muddied during an alla prima painting. I recommend that the last thing you do is repaint the brightest highlights in pure white and the darkest shadows in pure black.
Materials:
- You can work in either oils or acrylics, using your preferred colours.
- You can work on any type of surface; panel, paper, canvas etc. ideally prepared with a brown or grey-brown tone but you can work over white.
- I recommend limiting the number of brushes to 2-4 of varying sizes and cleaning them when necessary.
- You will need a medium to thin your paint (mineral spirits for oils or water for acrylics).
