Alla Prima Portrait Painting: Explanation of the process and methods

Okay guys, let's talk about this painting, this alla prima sketch. As you can see, I've started very loosely and my goal here is to establish the composition as soon as possible. So I'm using just a stain of approximate darks to create a silhouette of the head so I can see immediately the placement of the head on the canvas. Because sometimes we end up with awkward placement of the head when we do sketches and it can be painful. So we have to trim the canvas or we have to do something else. So I recommend if you want to work in such loose way without initial constructive drawing in the beginning, you just start with a general shape. And you work inside of this shape to see how you can manage the likeness and the illusion of the form. So when I have the shape of the head established already, I focus on the actual face. So as you can see, I focus mostly on the triangles of the eye sockets, triangular of the nose, triangular of the shadow, cast shadow from the nose. Again, triangular shapes of the lips and the cast shadow in that area. So you see, the whole composition of the face is just a bunch of certain triangles. And such simplification helps a lot in the very beginning, just to place features, to see the relationships and also to see how does it work. So at this stage, we already can see does it work or not. Are we satisfied with composition and with the placement of the features with a general depiction of the face or not? I'm using mostly the soft brushes here, just long flats from Rosemary. And I still paint very, very thinly. You still can see the initial wash in certain parts of the face. And what you can see now on the screen is just a subtle modeling of the shapes of the forehead. So generally speaking, I already see the design of the shapes in my painting. And now it's time to establish the lips and also the shadows under the nose and on the shadow part of the head. The core shadow is very close to the outline. So we don't have big shadow shapes. Mostly, most of the planes are light family values. And what is really important, my top priority for the values here is to have the value of the distant part of the distant half of the face be darker than the closest part of the face. Because if we squint down, we can see that symmetrical arrangements of shapes along the center line, they have different values altogether. So I recommend you to squint a lot. And by squinting, I mean squinting almost to the completely closed eyes. So if closed eyes are 100% and open eyes 0%, the squinting, the good squinting is about 80 to 85%. For the skin tones, I mixed the very simple mixture just to start with. I used transparent red oxide, titanium white and king's blue to create some sort of desaturated yellow color. The most important here is to have it really desaturated. So we don't really have strong chroma in the very beginning of our painting. And if you feel like your mixtures are not really interesting or they look muddy, just check the temperatures first. So just maintain the temperature of the shadow and the temperature of the light. They should be separated, like they should be opposite. So if shadows are warm, and in our case, they look very brown, the light has to be cold, like grayish in our case. And the second thing for the skin tones is just to maintain the lights desaturated, especially in the beginning. You can always make things look more saturated later by adding chromatic areas in the transitional mid-tones. I am still working with big brushes here because I just want it to be more efficient. You can work with the smaller rounds if you like. It's totally fine. Just keep in mind that all the edges, better to keep them soft at this stage of the painting. I've made some decision about edge. The cast shadow from the nose is going to be my sharpest edge so I've already placed it there with a sharp edge so I can refer to it. And the rest of the edges are going to be very soft. As you can see on my palette, I keep the shadows and the lights separated. I have plenty of space to keep my palette organized. I don't really need a lot of area for mixing for this painting. All I need to have is just some pool of lights and some pool of shadows so my mixtures are not going to be contaminated with each other and it is totally fine. You can see in the light area I have desaturated base, more saturated yellow-brown color and down below we have some kind of a pinkish-reddish mid-tones. I recommend you do not worry about how monochrome painting can look at this stage. Keep in mind that this is just the beginning. I think it's about half an hour, maybe 40 minutes of work and I also recommend you to step away every half an hour. The best way is just to put the timer. So every time when time is up, you just walk away for a couple of minutes and you get back so you can see all mistakes or small things which you have to fix or things you didn't notice before because you've been too occupied with the process. So when you work from photos, I recommend you to set a timer to walk away. Okay, here you can see that I started to mix some green color because I don't want to be too predictable with the shadows. All we need to maintain is just the warmth in the shadows so I don't want them to look very, very cool. So no blue primary, just a little bit to create a green and I do the same now with the lights. I introduced blue primary in the light areas so the temperature of the skin tones is getting cooler towards the light because the light is cold and I assume, and also I see it on the photo, that the skin tones are getting cooler and lighter in the areas which are most perpendicular to the light source but at the same time, I use more red primary in the transitional mid-tones and also in some dark accents to create vibrancy. So every time when you see chromatic or saturated area in the skin tones, focus on exact placement of saturated part. In most of the cases, the most chromatic parts will be transitional half-tones but not the general light itself. So if you maintain the difference between the light and transition from the shadow, like let's say, for example, in the nose, transitional half-tone will be red but the general light shape of the nose will be more neutral. The nose will look as it should without being over-chromatic. So I'm still using the long flats. I still feel quite comfortable modeling with them and they're very soft. The point of using such brush is we can work very precisely but at the same time, very loosely with the same, with just using one brush. So using the corner of it or the blade side of it, I can work with the small details and using broad side, I can feel quickly the big areas of my painting. And also such brush is very good for blending on top of the canvas, like kind of a modeling. I prefer to work, to consider my work more like a sculpting with a pigment instead of drawing. It is why I try to train myself to see the form and to depict the form without initial construction drawing. Although I highly recommend to draw and to practice constructive approach. And also if you feel more comfortable with initial pencil drawing before you commit to painting, it's absolutely nice. So I highly recommend to do it. But try to think about three dimensionality of the form. So here you can see that I apply more and more thicker paint at the same areas of light. So the illusion of the form is modeling with the value but also with a different thickness of the paint applied to the canvas. By the way, I'm using just a canvas, stretched canvas here in this painting. I stretch such canvas on stretcher bars and if I like the painting, if painting is successful, I remove it from stretcher bars and I glue the canvas to aluminum composite panel. I'm using Beaver film, very archival adhesive to have full control over all materials I use in creating of art. More modeling here and yeah, everything is very obvious. I just want to show the muzzle of the mouth and it is very, very important part because distant part of muzzle of the mouth should be darker than the nearest part of the muzzle of the mouth. But since it is more perpendicular to the light source, it should be lighter. So I have to deal with it and you can see now that I have this illusion of something protruding from the face and this is absolutely great for such areas as mouth and nose. The highlight in between the nose and the eye socket is going to be blue and I already started to place some bluish mixture over there. First attempt of the highlight in the nose and feel free to work this way. You just apply the light and if highlight is too strong or the placement is not really correct, you can just blend it in and start again. So if your temperatures and mixture and your values are correct, mistakes will not be really severe and you can just use it as a blending device like as you can see it now. Just applying loosely, more saturated, thicker paint in the area. I can just blend it in and if I'm not satisfied, I can just cover it with something more correct. But if the temperature is wrong, let's say if the mixture is cold but it should be warm, it is better to revert. So to erase or to scrape down this area and to fill it with the proper mixture because it is very, very difficult to overlap, to cover the wrong temperature mixture with a correct one. They will mix together anyways because we are dealing with a wet on wet painting. So Alla Prima has benefits but it also has some drawbacks and pitfalls of making skin tones look too muddy. In the modeling of the features, the most important is to maintain the soft edges. Just try to keep the edges softer. I know it is difficult to keep edges soft but at the same time to create solid design of the different planes but it is crucial for creating believable illusion of the face or even of the person. So for this, I just use soft brushes and I try to do not overdo the value contrast. So the values, they look pretty much the same but just a slight difference in the value or in the temperature can do the job. Like in modeling of the eye, I know that the sharpest edge in the eye is going to be the highlight inside of the eye. So the rest of the edges are going to be soft. And another important thing for the eye is to keep in mind that the upper eyelid is always casting the shadow on the actual eye into the eye. And plus we have the eyelashes there. So this dark accent below the upper eyelid is utmost important. And there is also another aspect. The eyelid can be depicted with three or four different planes. And one of the planes is going to be perpendicular to the light source. And this plane will be aligned with a highlight in the iris of the eye. And also it will be aligned to the highlight in the lower eyelid. So try to look for such alignments in the highlights. It will help you to depict the form faster and with more effortless look. So now it is more about the subtle rendering and subtle blending of the paint. To be totally clear, I believe at this stage the sketch is already looking good. So if you have such a result, probably it is time to slow down. If you feel like it is going to be good painting, do not rush in the end. Because a la prima can be very tricky. We can ruin the painting in the very end and it can be really frustrating. So slow down, you can always work on it tomorrow or week after when it is dry. So you can oil it out and continue because all we need at this initial a la prima stage is proper and correct design of the planes, design of the values and the likeness. If you have all of these things and your temperatures and skin tones are okay, I will consider slowing down. And let's talk a little bit about the initial stain I've made in the very few minutes and the very few first minutes of this sketch. It is still there in the hair. So I didn't spend any time on modeling the hair or designing the hair. All I had to do is just to create some cast shadow from the hair and just darker occlusion shadows inside of it. So my recommendation is when you see the big dark mass, big dark shapes, try to mix them as correct as possible from the very beginning and apply them with a broad, loose brush strokes and ignore them because they will hold the illusion, they will hold the foundation for your successful painting. So I hope it was helpful for you, this small tutorial. And I'm going to upload small tutorials like this next month along with a patron-only content. And feel free to share your sketches with me on Discord or in social medias. I would really love to see them. Happy painting, guys, and see you later. Bye.