Here's my first floral alla prima of the year and its development :)

Greetings and salutations Everyone!

In this post I thought I would share and discuss the development of my latest and first alla prima floral painting of the year.

In the beginning, I started with a pre toned raw umber canvas surface and established a generalized preliminary drawing in paint.

Working methodically, I started laying the darks first on the red/pink rose.

As I loosely defined the rose’s outside parameters with the block in, I am continually keeping this in mind as I am always “juggling” shape relationships..working from the inside to the outside.

At this stage I am still not so much concerned with precision as establishing values. This in particular is rather difficult in considering flowers in general as there is so many subtle transitions to work through as well as the petals themselves having a transparent flesh like quality.

Now that I have initially finished the first rose, I then began to establish the darkest values/shadows/shapes of the second rose.

I’d also like to point out that once the initial “pass” of the first rose began to set a little, I then could go over it again using some longer filbert brushes so as to easily build upon it without disturbing the initial paint layer.

Once again working from the inside to the outside and back again, I then started to establish a range of values while simultaneously refining the block in.

As I am routinely stepping back from the painting to reevaluate my progress, I then started to notice that my darks were off in the white rose. While at the same time, I suspected the initial pre toning wasn’t helping presently in the sense that at that time as oil paint has an inherently transparent quality, the umber was still showing through affecting the values. This would begin to go away as I proceeded to apply more paint.

..Still plugging away! At this point I am finding that I’m needing to increase the amount of cadmium yellow and quinacradone rose in the shadows where I was previously mistaken.

..I then after I worked in the stems, I'm pretty much finished!

Alla Prima Roses 2018
9" x 11"
Oil on canvas

The palette I used for this painting was titanium white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ocher, cadmium red, quinacradone rose, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, raw umber, and ivory black.

Please feel free to let me know what you think?

Thanks for reading Everyone!

-James Hansen