Discussion on charcoal Lavender hill studio

Discussion on charcoal at my new favourite portraiture school

Learning how to paint Alla Prima

I have been trying to learn how to paint Alla Prima (in one sitting) for the past few month and even if the result is pretty bad, I feel I am discovering new things every week and gradually progressing.

It is all rubbish but hopefully you can learn something from it.

First painting was so bad I eventually used it as a palette to mix my colours ;-)

Second painting I had no clue how to mix my colours or even match the skin of the model, let alone the facial features ;-) This painting was probably my first one actually.

Third one got a bit better but I wanted to be a bit too fancy and stylise the colours to have cold hues in the shadows and warm ones in the light..... way too advanced concepts for me ;-)
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Fourth one is getting better with colours matching, model is still a bit too pink

Fifth one. Now we are finally getting somewhere. The colours were still really hard to match but I was finally having a bit of fun. Notice the underdrawing . This is the way I work at the moment. Working in that manner allows for a semi finished drawing, even if not all the areas are finished. Pros don't do it but I am no pro ;-)

Week 6. Unfortunately it wasn't one model but two we have had this week so things got a lot more complicated. I should have stuck with just one model but I loved the design of the scene. This time was an eye opener. It is common sense but it had never occured to me that I should use white as my main paint and only add a tiny bit of colours to it. Underdrawing done in 30 minutes, painting in 1h

Life drawing week 22

That's it, this week I switched from graphite to charcoal pencils. I admit I am going a bit overboard with the blacks but it is so pleasant to have so many values to play with.

Wednesday class, the model posed with her baby which was really good but it made me realize I have no clue how to draw babies and eventually stuck to drawing the model instead.

Friday class was really good. The model was great and he came with his own props!!!!

This time, instead of speeding up to finish the overal body for the quick poses, I decided I would start with one part of the body, do as much details as possible and make my way down until I ran out of time. It worked out really well for me. It is a lot of fun as you need to keep paying attention to negative space, angles and distances.

One downside to the pencils I use is the fact that they are really difficult to erase. Maybe I should use the HB version rather than the 2b.. If it happens it is less greasy.

Watts demo Friday night

and a pretty good website I had never heard of before

http://underpaintings.blogspot.co.uk/