Course Review: Alla Prima Challenge 2024

Instructor: Arthur Gain

Why I decided to take this course

I took Arthur Gain’s Portrait Painting Bootcamp and was curious how he would adapt this new course to focus on alla prima painting. I also wanted to improve my alla prima painting skills since my oil painting process is slower than I would like.

Short and small oil painting studies, 10 and 15 minutes.

Course structure

This was a 5-week course. Short video were released Monday-Thursday with daily assignments provided. Each Saturday, 3-hour live sessions are scheduled. Students can paint along with the instructor, communicating through Zoom, or watch the painting session and do the 3-hour alla prima painting at a later point in time. Recordings of the live sessions are also provided through the instructor’s Alla Prima Academy online platform for students unable to attend the live sessions. Students can share their work through the Alla Prima Academy platform or through the Facebook group moderated by the instructor and his assistant who also moderates the live session Zoom chats. I did not sign up for a critique slot, so my review will focus on the course material and the live sessions.

Each week focused on different components:

Week 1 - Form/Anatomy

Week II - Value/Temperature

Week III - Color/Mixing

Week IV - Edges/Blending

Week V - Composition

John Singer Sargent self-portrait value study.

Personal lessons I learned from this course

• Paint slow to paint fast

  • It’s better to establish a strong drawing (even with paint) at the beginning, even if it takes longer than you expect, so you waste less time correcting your mistakes and more time painting

• Turn your painting upside down to force yourself to paint what you see and not what you think you see

• When the plane/form changes, the value and/or color changes

• To avoid lifting paint:

  • Use softer brushes

  • Don’t press hard with the brush, but move it parallel to the canvas, applying paint softly by holding the brush near the end of its handle

  • Use more paint

  • Use less medium

Head study focusing on value and colors of general shapes.

Limited palette study.

Highlights/Favorite aspects

• The short exercises that forced me to stop focusing so much on the details and spend more time on the construction and form of the head

• The lessons on value/temperature and color/mixing in which we learned about the color bands of the face and painted a high-key painting. I still need more practice mixing paint, but it feels less intimidating than when I first started my oil painting journey.

• The limited palette exercises. I felt less overwhelmed trying to decide what colors to mix and could focus more on the actual painting process.

Thick paint study. I could have still used more paint.

Feedback

I hope future online classes continue to provide captions for the videos. Some of the initial videos did include them, but then there were a few that didn’t have them until other students brought this to the instructor’s attention. Afterward, captions were included with the lesson and live session recordings.

There was one exercise we worked on for more than one week in the challenge. About 2/3 through the first video, the surface size is mentioned and it is twice the size of the one I was working on. Since we had been doing short exercises on smaller surface sizes, I assumed this one was the same. Had it been indicated we would be working on a continuous exercise, I would have stopped and switched to a larger size to continue my practice exercise. (Painting small is still a challenge for me.) So, when a survey was provided at the end of the course, I suggested to the instructor that a brief written description of the surface size be included with the video recordings. This is my nit-picky feedback for the course :)

Unfinished skin tone range study. I would like to repaint this on a bigger surface size.

Composition practice.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I quite enjoyed this course as it did challenge me to paint in a limited time. I hope to put some of the techniques I learned into practice for my own projects. While the color palette used in this course was not my personal favorite, it did make me try out color mix combinations I would have not considered before. I am not averse to trying different mixes, but as I move on to working on my personal studies, I plan to try other combinations to see what works best for my painting progress.

I also hope to find more opportunities to paint people from life since it is a skill I want to strongly develop.

Week 3 alla prima session. Model: Jessica. This was my favorite alla prima session from the course.