Alla Prima Painting

1. Introduction: With Steve Simon. All prima painting or direct painting in oils is this very sumptuous, energetic and painterly style of art. Historically, it was associated with rebelling against the strictures placed on artists by academia. It is also the creative breakthrough that gave rise to impressionism, which was itself associated with expressiveness and liberation. Okay. For all these reasons and more, la prima painting is an attractive style of art that captivates artists and patrons alike. At the same time, however, it can be somewhat challenging to create art in this style. Now to help you meet this challenge in this class, I will do a variety of things. First, I'll present how to plan an la prima painting. Very important. Second, suggest how to simplify your painting and your workflow. Third, I'll show you approaches on how to begin your painting and fourth demonstrate some fundamentals and nuances of brushwork. Lastly, we're going to bring all of these and more together in our project where we will complete a painting from start to finish. To better appreciate la prima painting, we will also take a brief journey into art history. We'll investigate how la prima painting evolved out of classical academic painting while paying particular attention to a few pioneers who led the way in what we can learn from them. Okay. So thank you for your interest and I'll see you in class. Okay. 2. Historical Perspective: This is the sixth class in my ten class oil painting curriculum. To understand la prima painting, we must first understand the tradition that predated it. In my class on the classical academic painting method, we studied the method of the masters dating back to the early Renaissance. This academic painting was very tight, both in terms of its methodology, which was very systematic and its actual technique of applying paint, which was quite calculating. Creating oil paintings in the classical academic style, certainly has many virtues, but expediency and expressiveness tend not to be among them. This is where the term la prima painting comes in. Al prima in Italian means at the first or in this context in one sitting. The French say premier at the first shot. Instead of creating an under drawing, then an under painting and glazing multiple layers that draw in between, A Prima says, no, we're going to do this directly all at once. It is therefore also called direct painting. Prima is by definition expedient and it's precisely this expediency that yields expressiveness. If you are committed to working quickly, there is no time for overthinking and obsessing on detail. That is not to say that the calculating mind is abandoned altogether. It's just that it's not allowed to crowd out the expressiveness, which feels very liberating. It is this sense of expressiveness and implied freedom that makes all of prima so attractive. Now, there's one artist whose career is the historical fulcrum, we can say, about which this painting technique tilts. Diego Valsqez was a Spanish artist during the Baroque period. As an artist who was classically taught and employed by Royals, both his education and patronage dictated an adherence to the accepted academic style of painting. Problem was Vsquez had this independence street and through visits to Italy, became enamored with and influenced by the painting style of Titian. Okay. You see, Titian, this great Venetian school artist, died more than two decades before lascz was born. But in his art, in Titian's art, he exhibited a somewhat non conforming style. Titian's painterly compositions did not conceal brushwork, as taught by academia. Rather his work openly displayed death brushwork. Even celebrating along with wait for it, flashes of wet on wet painting, something not done in academia. This was very exciting to Velasquez and later in his career, he adopted this beautiful painter mus to his works, though often being conflicted between the traditional pull of his patrons and the innovative push of his creative impulse. Now, this was mid 17th century. It would take more than two centuries before the art scene in late 19th century, Paris would develop an appreciation for the Spanish Golden Age and its masters. Edward Man, among those early impressionists who launched a movement predicated upon direct painting, studied in copian and Vue at the Louvre in Paris. 18 79, John Singer Sargent, the European trained American artist whose name has become virtually synonymous with Ala Prima painting, went to the Prado Museum in Madrid multiple times to study laskez work and paint copies. In fact, Alaske work would posthumously go on to influence many great artists of the time each in uniquely different ways, but always with a license of liberation. At this historical understanding of the liberating essence of Ala Prima painting, we will next examine the technique of direct painting. 3. Lesson 1 - Basic Principles & Brushwork: A la prima painting is all about the wet on wet painting process. And when we say wet on wet, we really mean there is we're applying wet layers of paint on top of another layer of paint that has not dried, that is still wet as opposed to waiting for layers to dry and then applying additional layers or glazes on them. Now, when we're painting wet on wet, there's a number of principles that we need to abide by. Let's take a look at some of those principles now. So, simple setup, I have a primed canvas panel, a light and dark color of paint, and then I'm using galcid light as my medium and gamsol as my solvent to clean my brush. The first principle of wet on wet painting is what's called thick over thin. So I've just applied a thin layer of pins gray to the canvas panel, and now I'm taking a thick layer of zinc white and applying it with the palette knife. Now, the reason we do this is that thin layers dry faster than thick layers, and you want the faster drying layers lower. If the top layers dry faster than the lower layers, you run the risk of your painting cracking over time. Here I'm repeating the thick over thin process using a paint brush and illustrating a concept known as scumbling. Scumbling is an important aspect of brush work. It's something that would have been frowned upon by classical academic painting, but it's something that is celebrated in la prima painting. It is characterized not by a mixing of two layers, but a painterly comingling of two layers. The next principle is what's known as fat over lean. Paint is lean when it has no medium added or has solvent added to it. Next, you'll see I'm dipping my brush in the medium and then adding it to the white paint. This makes it fat. Similar to the manner that thick dries slower than thin, fat dries slower than lean, and therefore, fat is applied after lean. I want to discuss another important la prima principle, and that is the notion of paint it and leave it alone. Now, remember, this painting technique, la prima is meant to really showcase deft confident brushwork. And if we're paint putting strokes down on the canvas and then reworking those strokes. That does not exactly exude confident brushwork. So as best you can and I struggle with this at times, as best you can paint it and leave it alone. Now, also, we've been talking a lot about wet on wet painting. A prima isn't solely wet on wet painting. There is absolutely the opportunity to do dry brush work. Dry brush work is when we load up our brush and then delicately apply it to a dry canvas or dry layer to create this kind of effect. Now, at first blush, this would seem to violate the prima principle of starting and finishing the painting in one sitting. But I can tell you dry brushing after an la prima painting has been completed is quite common and it's very effective. It's very effective at bumping up highlights and deepening darks, and I've used it in this painting in both cases. I've added some highlights here in dry brushing and have also deepened those darks. It's also used to add texture to areas. Let's take a look at how the master John Singer Sargent handled this. Sergeant is often lauded as the master of prima, and we see wonderful wet on wet technique throughout this painting. It's clearly evident in the Bow of the dress and in much of the chiffon of the dress. In these areas, we can see how different colored layers of wet paint are interacting with each other. If we zoom in on this white area of the chiffon, however, we see something different going on. Notice how the white paint in these areas is not interacting with the colors beneath it. This is clear evidence that Sergeant let the lower layers dry first and then applied the white paint as dry brush. This leads me to another point of Sergeant creating these prima masterpieces ironically in multiple sittings. Remember, a prima is supposed to be done in one sitting. Keep in mind, this is a large canvas. It's bigger than three feet wide by four feet tall, and Sergeant would have performed this painting in multiple sittings. To do this, he would have had to work his way around the canvas, in effect, creating multiple all a prima paintings on one canvas. And then when the painting was finished, he would finish it off with dry brushing. I bring this up to point out that la prima painting does not need to be relegated to smaller paintings that you can do in one sitting. It can be used for larger canvases as well, and that there's no hard and fast rule that says you can't allow layers to dry and then paint over them. It's just that this dry brushing should also be applied with the same sense of confidence or Bravura that the lower wet on wet layers are executed with. In the next segment, we'll take a look at how to plan your la prima painting with a value study and how to begin painting your composition on Canvas. 4. Lesson 2 - The Value Study: Hroughout the classes in this curriculum, I have emphasized the idea that painting is all about tackling the three complexities of form, value, and color. In the classical academic painting method, we recognize that this is done through the underdrawing, then the underpainting. Then finally, with the actual painting. Now, in A prima, we've said, we're not going to go through these three steps. We're going to do this all at once. We still must ask ourselves, how are we going to tackle these three levels of complexity. To answer that, let's begin with this photo. This is a photograph I took in my studio as source material for a painting, features daffodils and some blood oranges. I really like the overall composition of the photograph, but I feel like there's some things that can be improved upon by slightly moving some of the elements and changing some of the values. The question then becomes, how do I make these changes without just launching into the painting? If I simply launch into the painting, I might find out at the end of the painting that I might have preferred to arrange things differently or use different values in different areas. The solution to this dilemma is to do a quick value study. For reasons that I'll get into in much greater detail in a later class on composition, I've raised the horizontal line of the table. I've darkened the lit part of the table. I've elevated the plate up in the composition. I've shortened the stems of the daffodils and darkened the daffodils to the upper right. The point here is that the value study can be done very quickly and then altered without a huge commitment and time of resources and yields a lot of good information. It is often said, color gets all the credit and value does all the work, and that is really true when it comes to composition. So in doing the value study, we get a really good understanding of whether or not our composition is going to work. So it is the value study then that becomes the compositional roadmap for placing elements and establishing their values in your final painting. Here you can see the progression from reference photo, the value study to final prima painting. Here's an example of that same progression where I used the value study to not only change the aspect ratio of the painting, but again to play with the values to help enhance the composition. In the next segment, we'll take a closer look at how to establish form in an prima painting. 5. Lesson 3 - Drawing It Up: It is often said all good painting start with a good drawing. When we studied the classical academic painting method in the previous class, we drew a detailed underdrawing that comprehensively defined the shapes or forms that we were to paint. The la prima method, however, dismisses this layered approach to requiring an under drawing and an underpainting beneath the painting. So the question then is, how do we establish the forms that we're going to paint? Well, we won't be drawing with the charcoal stick, like we did in the classical academic painting method. We'll be using our paint brush. And we'll be doing this one of two ways. We'll be using our brush to either create a form drawing or a mass drawing. In either case, we'll start with a toned canvas. In this case, I'm using burnt sienna thinned with gam sol, and then wiping it down with a paper towel. I then use my brush alternately as an eraser and as a pencil to establish my form drawing. I'm using burnt umber here for my drawing. Now, I'll be the first to admit that drawing this way certainly takes a little bit of practice, but I encourage you to give it a go. It's really quite fun because even as you're working the drawing, if you're making any kind of mistakes, you can always use your brush and paper towel as an eraser and then rework things. Oil paint is also quite a forgiving medium. Even as you get deeper into the painting, you can kind of push it around a little bit. If you feel like you need additional instruction on form drawing or contour drawing, please check out my class drawing for painters. Now, in mass drawing, instead of drawing the contours like we did in our form drawing, we mass in shapes that we see. This is actually a digital painting I created in procreate. But the concept is the same with traditional paints. Instead of focusing on the edges of shapes, you focus on the masses of shapes. In this way, the painting is a building up of paint on paint and refining along the way. I encourage you to play around with both techniques. You might find that you have a bias for one technique, or you might also find that you prefer one to the other based on what kind of composition you're working on. We'll close out this segment with a time lapse so the remainder of this painting, and then please join me in the next segment for the class project. 6. Alla Prima Project - Part 1: Welcome to the project, where we'll be doing an la prima painting of this simple still life. You can download the image in the download resources area of the project and resources section of this class. You'll also need a 12 by nine canvas or a canvas of your choice with a four by three aspect ratio, the solvent and medium of your choice, and then I've listed the suggested palette. It's the palette I'm using, but you can modify this with similar paints you may have. Prior to the painting, we will also be doing a value study, so to this list, you can add black and a small canvas. When you've completed your project, please upload it to the M project area of the project and resources section of this class for me to review and for other students to benefit from as well. Okay, let's get started. Now, even though this arrangement is quite simple, just an apple and three grapes, I think there's some things we can do to make the composition more interesting. I think I'd like to move the apple off center a little bit more. Maybe make the fruit a little bit more prominent in the composition and probably bring the loan grape that's off to the right in a bit more. So let's start with a value study to play around with some of these ideas. For the value study, I'm going to use a white and a black and three values in between. So a five values study, and I'm going to start by drawing in the major elements, just kind of about where I think I'd like to place them. Then I'll mess in my background with my darkest value and use it for my darkest shadows. Then I'll add my next darkest shadows value four. And I feel I want to add a shadow to this lower left corner. Next, I'll add the mid tones value. Then we'll move into value two, and some highlights. At this point, I want to stop and evaluate how this composition reads. I like the overall placement of the elements and the shadow that I've added to the lower left. There are three things though that I can think of to improve this composition. The first thing I'd like to do is to darken the table up a bit to create a little bit of value separation between the table and the fruit. I've also rendered the grapes a little bit too small, so we're going to correct that here. And the third thing I'd like to modify is the size of this shadow on the apple. Reestablish the highlights, and there you go. I think I'm pretty happy with this composition. As we look at these images side by side, we can see the changes we've made, albeit subtle, make for a stronger painting, and will provide us good guidance as we embark on our A prima painting. One of the central tenets of A prima painting is simplify. This applies not only to simplifying details within the composition, but also to simplifying the palette. For this painting, I've limited my palette to a yellow, two reds, a blue, and two earth tones. Limiting the palette in this way will narrow the color gamut that I can achieve, but it will greatly expedite the color mixing process and more importantly harmonize the colors within my painting. In addition to these colors, I'll also be using zinc white, and another color I'd like to introduce you to if you're not familiar with it is Portland gray deep. Portland gray is not so much a color as it is a mixing agent. It's used to universally desaturate any color. Basically, it resides smack dab in the middle of the color wheel, and therefore, when added to any other hue, it desaturates that hue. So it's a great tool to expedite the color mixing process. It's available from gambling in three different values. Another way to simplify the process that I highly recommend when painting a prima is to pre mix your colors. So here, based on the colors that I see in my reference image, I've just pre mixed in array of colors that I'll be using in the painting. All prima painting can be very enjoyable if you're able to stay in the flow of the work, but having to stop to mix paint can interrupt this flow. You'll find, therefore, that pre mixing your colors will help your painting experience. In addition to my palette of colors, I'm using gam sal as my solvent and galcd light as my medium. Okay, to get started, I'm going to add some gam sol to my burnt sienna and then start to apply it as a wash to my canvas. This will serve as a way to tone my canvas in preparation for the painting. Hroughout the painting process, we're going to use the source image and the value study as references, and it's specifically the value study that I'm going to be using as a reference for my form drawing that I'm creating with burnt umber diluted with solvent. And the drawing really is just a series of adjustments. I use my brush alternately as a pencil by loading it with paint and as an eraser by loading it with solvent. The form drawing shouldn't be exceedingly detailed. We're just striving for general shapes here. Next, I'm going to mass in my background. Instead of painting it black, I'm using a mixture of my Earth tones and a lizard and crimson. Here I'm applying the background color relatively thin, and I'm also adding medium to it, which simultaneously makes it fat. I know sounds weird, right? A thin layer of paint that's also fat. So this in fluid layer will translucently allow some of the tone canvas to shine through and accentuate some of the brush strokes here. In other words, a little more of a glazed look. Get the glare out of the way there and you can see the background color and the exposed brushwork a little better now. Okay. By using colors from my limited palette for the background color instead of using black, you'll see how this background color will help unify or harmonize the other colors in the painting. I'm starting to work on the lit part of the table, and I've decided I'm going to stray a little bit from the value study here. I've come to the conclusion that I want this table at darker still. If you recall when we're working on the value study, we had a sort of a middle value, darken it up a little. I feel like it still needs to be a little bit darker. I think this will help to make the fruit pop some more. And this is kind of indicative of the process. We want to use the reference photo and the value study as guidance, but we don't want to have to slavishly adhere to them to the point where we're not making better decisions as we work on the actual alla prima painting. Now, I'll start working on some of the cast shadows. And working wet on wet will add some interest to different areas of the table. And please join me for the next segment as we begin to paint the fruit. 7. Alla Prima Project - Part 2: Welcome back to the project. Now, I'll start messing in the form shadows of the apple. And as we've been emphasizing in A prima brushwork matters. And to that end, we want to keep the brush reasonably large. If it gets too small, these brush strokes will start to look labored. A variety of brush strokes is also desirable, different sizes, different directions, different speeds, different pressures. All of these things help to create a more pleasing visual experience for the beholder. And one way to help facilitate this is to experiment with a variety of grips of the brush. So you can see my hand is sometimes holding the brush like a pencil and other times quite differently. All of this produce different brush strokes. In general, the technique here is to mass in large areas of similar color and then to paint wet on wet over the top of these massed in areas. I'm going to pause the video for a moment here to talk more specifically about the two distinct ways of painting wet on wet. If I want to mix into that light color, I hold my brush perpendicular to the canvas, and I want to be able to apply pressure so I can hold it like a pencil and then mix the two colors together. And in a situation like that, I can do dark on top of light like I've done, or I can do light on top of dark. Okay. If however, I'm going to scumble two colors together, I want to take a light color and put it over the top of a dark color. And when I do this, the grip is different. I need my brush relatively parallel to the canvas, and I'm not holding it like a pencil, generating pressure towards the canvas, rather I'm lightly dragging it over the top of the other color. We'll continue on with our confident brushwork. Remember, one of the principles of prima painting, paint it and forget it. But if you do manage to put a stroke down that you just can't live with, you can always just scrape it off with a palette knife. You can see particularly at this stage, how helpful it is to have colors pre mixed. This enables me to stay in the flow of the painting without having to interrupt that flow, put down the brush, and start mixing additional colors. I'm not getting enough value separation between the apple and the background, so I'm going to go ahead and darken up that background a little bit more. Oh, right. All we have left are the grapes. I'm going to concentrate on cooler greens on the shadow side of the grapes and warmer greens and yellows on the sunlit parts of the grapes. Maybe even exaggerating these colors a little bit, at least in comparison to the reference image. Keeping the paint dabs large and juicy and resisting the impulse to smooth them out. Now we're going to add the stems of the grapes. If this had been a classical academic painting, we would have included these stems in our under drawing. But in Area, we just do this on the fly. This is, however, forcing me to scumble the dark parts of the stems on top of the light background of the grapes. Something we mentioned is not recommended. If I'm having a problem, though, achieving the darks that I want, I can always bump them up a little bit with some dry brushing after the painting has dried. Earlier, I embellished the blue ambient light influencing the upward facing shadows of the apples. And so I'll have to be consistent with that on the grapes. And then I'm ready to drop in some finishing highlights and a few small details. And despite the fact that I'm technically not done with the painting, I still have the dry brushing to do, I'm going to put my signature in now because I want it also to have that wet on wet appearance. Here's the painting after it's dried and after I have dry brushed some reflected color into these shadow areas. And here's a side by side comparison with the source image. So T three things to point out. First, I think you'll agree the limited palette that we're using helped harmonize the colors, particularly as it pertains to the background and the table. Second, a repositioning and re sizing of the elements has helped with the composition. And third, the painterly quality of our brushwork makes for a more engaging piece of art. I hope you've enjoyed painting along, and please don't forget to upload your project to the my project area of the project and resources section of this class, for myself to review and for other students to benefit as well. Thanks again.