Painting Values
So in this post I want to share and demonstrate an approach to a loose alla prima (wet on wet) painting working from a reference photo I’d taken. Here’s the subject (dear friend) and here’s the video of stills to show the approach to this. It’s an acrylic painting on board. This work was completed in circa 2hrs standing at the easel so represents a lighter exercise to keep brush strokes fresh and intentional.
Palette and your setup
Set up well aware of your working space, palette and brushes. Intially working with an ochre ground or mix to neutral mid tone green. More on the palette and choice of colours in a seperate post.
Underpainting or ground tone
Start with a larger brush than is needed for initial stages. This keeps the work loose, helps you to stay out of the details in early stages. It helps to establishes tones, broad composition and encourages your instinct for drawing loosely with the brush. Holding your brush at the end and being in a standing position are really important to making natural strokes and instinctual gesture with your whole arm.
Further blocking in tones and shapes loosely
Here I continue to block in tones to establish form, volume and ‘place’ the figure in the space.
Further structure and colour work
Further refining the drawing with structural, intentional brushstrokes helps to give the work pictorial space and draws the eye in. The pace at which I work often changes here bringing a slower more considered placement of brushstrokes as compared to the energy of the earlier stages of the painting where it’s useful to bring a lighter faster touch with more emotional response to the subject matter.
Drawing and composition refined
Some stages here have not been represented in the sketchy time lapse (proper setup to follow) but essentially I’ve started to refine and slow the pace of mark making to establish and refine the form of the body in relation to the space. The values in the work continue to be adjusted and further correction to drawing of the figure.
Checking values of the painting
I’ve used a useful exercise (top tip) with the help of technology to assess the ‘value’ or tonal range of the painting by taking a photo of the painting towards end stage and desaturating this to better see the tonal values of the work as compared to the original reference photo. It’s interesting that, provided your values are sound, you can play with different colours (representational or non-representational) like the fauve painters. Subject of another blog post.
