Here’s my latest quick alla prima painting (Apples & Oranges) and its development :)
Apples & Oranges
8" x 10"
Oil on birch panel
2018
Greetings fellow Steemians!,
In today’s post I thought I’d share and discuss the development of my latest alla prima study :)
In the beginning I started with a loose block in with thinned paint. I admit that I noticed that this particularly tricky in that I was playing with composition. Normally I would’ve used an umber for the drawing, but for the sake of convenience I had some left over mixtures of burnt sienna and a little bit of ivory black.
I then began to mass in the background and groundplane with mixtures of burnt sienna, ultramarine blue and titanium white. I used a little bit of Oleogel and a larger brush to speed up the process.
Paying special attention to the subtle core shadows, I then started massing in the oranges and apple on the right. This painting in particular has a lot of reflected light.
Now that I finished the initial pass on the fruit, I then went back and refined them all as a whole. Due to the nature of the transparency of the paint and the nature of capturing the color yellow, I found it especially challenging as it took quite a bit of effort in piling on those lights!
At this particular stage of the painting, I found it very helpful in using some Rosemary extra long filbert brushes. They were helpful in that when building chroma they didn’t disturb the preceding brushstrokes. They have this special quality in laying them gently on top :)
After working in the highlights I then proceeded in finishing the background by starting on the midtones and working into the light.
...Aaannd it's done!
The palette I used for this painting was titanium white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ocher, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, and ivory black.
If you're interested in purchasing this painting, it can be found here on my website.
Please feel free to let me know what you think?
Thanks for reading Everyone!
-James Hansen