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.  

I hope you enjoyed this explanation of my painting. If so you can subscribe to my newsletters, follow the blog and share with anyone else you think would enjoy it too. Find the link below the blog post. I love feedback so let me know what you think of this or my website in general, tell me about yourself, ask questions or... whatever. Just click the “comment on this” tab at the top. 

Thanks!

Hans Guerin

Hello whomever it is reading my blog!

Welcome to my website. For those who don’t know me I am an artist and instructor at the Schuler School of Fine Arts. One of the classes I teach is figure drawing/painting.  We begin the semester with gestures and block in methods, progress into short poses, then to Alla Prima poses (1 full class) and finally to multi week poses. Moonlit started as an Alla Prima but I decided to continue the pose into another class. I told them I would demonstrate something creative on the next sitting. Here is the finished Alla Prima sitting:

The idea of the second sitting was to show the process of completely changing the light source. This is an important skill to learn. If you’re making up a realistic figure for a painting or drawing it is vital to be able to create a believable illusion of light and shadow. It is also completely necessary when combining several references that each have different illumination. Some or all of the light directions must be converted to have everything in the composition lit the same way.  
When changing the character of the light the artist must completely understand the volume of the object/model/area bring depicted. In the case of a figure, the study of anatomy as well as practicing figure drawing from a wide variety of poses and lighting greatly helps for this. Sculpture training, in my opinion, is the absolute best way to learn three dimensional form. 
In this demonstration I decided to alter the light source from a direction from upper left, to lower right (11pm on the clock to 5am), to a lower left to upper right orientation (7 o’clock to 1). I also converted the temperature of the light from warm to very cool.

This was really risky to do as a class demonstration. It is difficult enough to pull off a radical change like this. I decided to do it live for the students. I have flopped in front of classes plenty of times and in much less formidable circumstances. Always up for a challenge, I did it anyway. A major conversion like this starts with envisioning what it will look like then trying something. That usually falls short of the vision for the piece but will give you something to react to and make improvements upon. That means the first attempt usually doesn’t look very good; not ideal for showing the class.  Despite that it turned out as good as I hoped, something to improve upon but not quite there yet. Here’s the end of the demo after converting the light:

I did some fine tuning after the demonstration but nothing radically changed. One thing I decided to play up is the warmth in the flesh tone as the form turned away from the cool moon’s light. Here’s the final version:

I hope you enjoyed this explanation of my painting. If so you can subscribe to my newsletters, follow the blog and share with anyone else you think would enjoy it too. Find the link below the blog post. I love feedback so let me know what you think of this or my website in general, tell me about yourself, ask questions or... whatever. Just click the “comment on this” tab at the top. 

Thanks!

Hans Guerin