The Alla Prima Portait

Alla Prima is a comprehensive guide to direct painting, characterised by bold, expressive brushwork and a painterly, atmospheric surface. It covers the history of the direct methods in both Europe and America. From there, it includes detailed step-by-step lessons and discussions on drawing structure, broken and smooth brushwork, and colour development.

Alla Prima II Companion is a comprehensive guide outlining Richard Schmid's material, tool and techniques written from the perspective of his student Katie Swatland. The book offers full explanations of all painting preparations, with step-by-step images illustrating each process. Both Katie Swatland and Richard Schmid offer painting demonstrations with sequential images showing the developmental stages of Richard's paintings.

These pages practically glow with Kevin Macpherson's rich and powerful paintings! He shares his techniques for quickly capturing the mood of a scene in bold, direct brushstrokes, with step-by-step instructions that make it easy—simply a matter of painting the colors you see. Follow his lead and you too, can create landscapes and still lives in a vibrant, impressionistic style.

Want to paint more like Manet and less like Jackson Pollock? Students of art hailed Classical Drawing Atelier, Juliette Aristides’s first book, as a dynamic return to the atelier educational model. Ateliers, popular in the nineteenth century, teach emerging artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. The educational process begins as students copy masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. The many artists at every level who learned from Classical Drawing Atelier have been clamoring for more of this sophisticated approach to teaching and learning. In Classical Painting Atelier, Aristides, a leader in the atelier movement, takes students step-by-step through the finest works of Old Masters and today’s most respected realist artists to reveal the principles of creating full-color realist still lifes, portraits, and figure paintings. Rich in tradition, yet practical for today’s artists, Classical Painting Atelier is ideal for serious art students seeking a timeless visual education.

Complete with an Introduction by James Gurney, the author of Dinotopia, this guide introduces not only the techniques of oil painting but also the underlying principles of figure drawing. A series of images by the Old Masters includes 32 pages in full color, featuring paintings from the Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French, and British schools. "A masterly exposition." — Liverpool Daily Post.

A brilliant how-to guide book by award winning artist and tutor Peter Keegan. Learn how to produce your own excellent and convincing portraits by following easy to follow step-by-step pages to learn and develope the perfect portrait using the painterly alla prima method.