Reddit reviews Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting
We found 3 Reddit comments about Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Missing dust jacket, has underlining throughout but still a good copy.
I've been drawing for a long time and I can copy anything drawing-wise. I started painting in Photoshop 2 years ago, then started doing oil painting around 9 months ago. I learned the most by doing oil paintings while reading Alla Prima by Richard Schmid. That book and a lot of practice paintings help me get a good feel for color and value, and mixing pigments.
If I didn't learn to mix pigments in oils I probably would have been frustrated using Nicker Poster Color. But luckily mixing in oils and mixing in poster color is pretty much the same. It's not too hard to learn, but you do have to learn it by trial and error. I have a lot of practice mixing colors so using poster paint feels like second nature to me.
As for the process, if you know how to paint in Photoshop you can do it in Nicker Poster Color. It's quite similar to using Photoshop with a 100% opacity brush with size controlled by pressure. There is a watercolor aspect to it too, but only if you add more water to the color mix.
In the actual painting, I learned that laying down base tones before doing highlights helps a lot. What I mean by base tone is the color that gets used the most in a section. "Highlights" are the lesser used colors, and they can be dark/medium/bright. Here's an image explaining it. To reiterate, you want to lay down the base tones first and then apply the highlights.
If you look at my progress pics (linked at top comment) I have some pictures of before and after of painting the big bush on the left. For the majority of the painting I just worked like that. I laid down base tones, and then added highlights.
Tbh, if you want to start painting you just have to dive in. It's something you have to learn by doing I think. I have yet to find a resource better than just spamming practice paintings and reading Alla Prima. I also found Feng Zhu very helpful, especially his podcast and the "self teaching" episode. Hope this helps
important: Also, if you are buying Nicker Poster Color make sure to get a good watercolor brush with it, like this one.
I'm not sure about instructional DVDs, but I think the most helpful oil painting book I have is Richard Schmid's "Everything I Know About Painting". If you don't already have it, I highly recommend it.
http://www.arc-store.com/bovica.html literally anything from here will teach you sort of the classical approach, but is pricey.
https://streamlineartvideo.com/ same thing for this, I have the Cesar Santos DVDs (about $200 each), and they're about 20 plus hours, start to finish, every step on how to create something.
Human Figure Book\ literally probably the best book you can get for drawing the figure
Alla Prima Book everything you need to know about oil painting
https://guidetooilpainting.com/ great website to learn the basics
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It's a lot of practice, now I do watercolor paintings myself, but for oil paintings this is a great list of resources. It all kinda goes the same, you lay down and image and put the correct colors in the correct spots. I would say take more time with your drawing phase and the painting phase will be easier, but some like to go in w/ just a brush and attack it. Try things, suck for awhile and learn from it. I"m going to make a post about this to try and get some proper resources out there.
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