Hello, welcome back some of you and glad to meet you if this is your first time with me on my blog. Glancing back was an Alla Prima demonstration I did for my portrait class at the Schuler School of Fine Arts. Not only is this a one sitting demo but I did a fairly long talk to the students on the structure of the model and block in strategies to get started. I stopped to check in and give critiques to the students every 30-40 minutes. With Alla Prima there simply isn't any time to fuss over the initial drawing. You can see that the umber lines were more about alignment and structure than for likeness.

When applying the skin tone I went with a rather dark over saturated color. I do this on purpose. The darkness helps because it forces me to go really dark for the shadows to read against it and it provides a nice base for the highlights to pop. It allows me to create a wide range of highlight values and leave pure white for an absolute brightest bright. The color is over saturated because I will be muting it down with grays to transition to shadow and washing it out in the light areas. The end result is high value contrast and vibrant colors.

After the color block in I'm ready to draw and refine.

I like to bounce around the composition instead of building out from the focal area. This helps me with harmony in the whole piece. This method makes it less likely for me to lose my proportions as I get further out from the focal area. The tendency I have observed is when focusing in on one spot, it could grow or shrink and could throw off the proportions of the entire piece. In the technique I used the  likeness doesn't develop for a while. I could see in my minds eye how it would take shape. It can be unnerving to not have the start look like the model, or even human. It takes experience to be comfortable in those weird early stages knowing they are the setup for the likeness and details. I find it much easier to get the specific shapes right when they are in the context of the simplified values and colors of the whole piece. Layering paint can be tricky as well.

To wrap it all up it was just more refinement, softer transitions, more background. I find alla prima to be the best way to make progress. You don't always get a product out of it, however you improve your drawing skills, improve your color mixing, become more efficient, and get to experiment more.  

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Thanks!

Hans Guerin