Learning to paint "Alla Prima"

I didn't make the most of the facilities available to me at uni but if I had I would have still been annoyed paying all that money for tuition fees. Know why? Because you don't get taught a fucking thing. You get set work and it gets marked, suggestions might be made here and there but that's it. Aside from life drawing at no point were we ever pushed, given any guidance, told "Nope, that's shit, rub all that out and do it like this". So here I am and I've dabbled with paint here and there, I've got ways of colouring stuff and painting stuff if I need to but there's still so much I don't know.

And I want to know it. I want to learn. I want to be a good painter. So I'm going to have to teach myself. That's going to mean doing some shit paintings and sticking with it until they're not shit anymore.

What I want to learn at the moment is painting "alla prima", or all in one go, directly. None of this waiting for layers to dry bollocks. Even though the glazing method is more time consuming I think in some respects it may be easier...with that said, whilst the glazing method can produce amazing results I'm more interested in creating "painterly" sort of paintings, for want of a better word. I still want to strive for realism, but I want to see some brushstrokes, I want soft and lost edges, I want to work wet in wet and wet on wet and learn how to control this fucking paint, bend it to my will. I want to be able to paint like Sargent or Schmid, etcetera. That is to say, I like the results of their methods, I'd like to learn those methods and then paint like myself.

No opportunities to paint from life and to be honest I'd like to at least have my technique half figured out before I put myself in a position where people can actually see me painting lest I come across as some sort of poseur. So for now I'll work from a photograph, in this case a photo my brother took of our cat in the snow.

Laid in some very light, very turpy, colours in the background and started drawing in the subject with what I thought was Burnt Umber but was actually Burnt Umber. This was after poncing around for ages with charcoal trying to sketch it on.

I'm happy with the drawing stage. It ain't perfect but it's a start. Also scumbled in some cool background colours. I've laid down my darkest values in the figure...I don't really know what I'm doing but I was kind of happy at this point, though I think I may have gone too detailed too early. With that said I'm not really going to bother indicating any of the background details until the end. I reckon I'll put a lot of the grass and stuff in with a knife...If I'm going to learn, I might as well learn a lot, right?

I did go too detailed too early, it caused me all sorts of problems, and in my efforts to get the right colours I forgot all about getting the right values like a complete twat. So I got a rag and wiped it all back as much as I could. It's very obvious to me that I'm much better at drawing than  am at painting...but that's why we practice, so we can learn.

I decided to wipe back loads more. It's left a faint stain on the canvas but I can still wipe it further back if I need to. Even though it's lost a lot of the drawing and it's looking poncey and wishy washy at the moment I kind of like it; yeah I'll have to redraw in and re-establish some shit but I can see how this could work. If I laid in a very thin layer of paint as the overall local colour, then rub back at parts of it as I go to add different values.

I've noticed if you use the paint out of the tube as long as you haven't put a shitload on there, as long as you brush it on there thinly, really scrub it in, then you can apply paint over it without really disturbing the layer beneath.

I'll have to do something about that snout nose, it's looking well piggish.

At this point I'm angry and hungry. As ever when I'm learning something it's one step forward, two steps back. I'm going to leave it for now and pick it up again tomorrow...So far not off to a good start. But if I keep at it I know I'll get something out of it. I'm sure of it.

UPDATE

Today it's gone really badly. I spent ages just poncing around trying to mix up some paint that was the right colour and the right value for what I was doing and it just wasn't going anywhere. Made me realize how deficient I am when it comes to colour. I need to do one of them colour chart exercises because it was just pissing me off. At this moment I think it's beyond my ability to go straight into the painting worrying about colour, tone and drawing all at the same time, I simply don't have the experience to pull it off. So anyway, I got pissed off, doused a rag in turpentine and wiped the entire thing back as much as possible.

So...more or less back to where I started. I'm going to leave it for a while, do some drawing, relax a bit and come back and have another go in a bit. I'm not worried about "fat over lean" or cracking firstly because it's shit anyway and secondly because what's on there has had so much turpentine in it that whatever goes on next is bound to have more oil in it.

I think when I do come back to it I'm going to approach it differently. I jumped in straight at the deep end thinking I was going to tackle form, colour and tonal value all at the same time and pull off an expressive yet realistic masterpiece. No, it ain't happening, not fucking yet. So maybe spend more time at the "drawing" stage...using turpentine, and one colour mixed to a range of values, do a tonal underpainting, the turps should evaporate relatively quickly, one of the values can be the stain already on the canvas so I can treat the underpainting like a charcoal drawing and do a bit of dabbing and wiping at it. Then, with the values established, I can start worrying about colour. God, maybe I shouldn't even worry about colour at all, just do some monochromatic paintings and focus on value and brush control for now...like in life drawing you don't worry about colour until you're proficient with value drawing.

Either way I really ought to do a colour chart before then. It's all well and good having the colour wheel for reference but when you're standing there trying to paint and you're struggling to find your way to some ambiguous it's not much use having a reference chart somewhere, by doing the charts myself I'll actually see what's going on, and hopefully it'll stay in my memory.

I was getting really angry before I wiped this back and decided to start again. All this time spent in education and how much of it has been spent actually getting taught? I've heard a few references to colour theory here and there but when has anyone ever taken the time to fucking walk us through it? When has anyone given the slightest bit of advice on how to handle paint? Never! If I'm going to be 99% self taught why the fuck did I spend thousands of pounds on tuition fees?! Uni was a complete waste of time. What we need is the old master and apprentice system, if instead of all this college and uni bollocks I'd partnered up with a master artist and was watching him, or even her, work and having a go on bits myself...then I might have fucking learned something!