Today we are going to talk about doing Allaprima painting. Allaprima painting is an old fashion way of painting that you can do portraits with it or even still life or full scenes. What you are doing is you are going to paint in black, white and gray and for example I am going to show you on my color wheel I was talking to you about earlier, about your whites, grays, different tones of gray and blacks and this is a good way to start.
Draw yourself of a few boxes, a cone and a cylinder and a cone and a way that it almost looks like a ribbon. Remember you are an illusionist, you are the magician in painting and all these techniques help to make your painting look kind of real.
These are actually the scales and what you are going to do with your Acrylic paints with black and white only is you are going to mix them to get all these tones, you start with a darkest and go into the lightest and from this one you go to the lightest from there and work your way over to white and this will help you to start learning how to blend, draw yourself a cone, use your black and white and blend your colors to make them look three dimensional.
Remember the lighter color forward makes it look forward and darker color makes it go back, so you get your three dimensions. The same with the cone, you know you are going to have a wider base so its going to be darker on the sides than it is at the top. Ribbon, this is a good technique to learn, you start with a ribbon waving the darker ends of the bottom and the lighter ends are up towards the light and then you put one line on one side to make it look flat. Remember you are the magician.
After your painting with Allaprima you are going to do a wash in the beginning. After you are finished you are going to start adding color and I am going to give you example, you use pure color and you want to add a lot of water to make it look transparent, you don’t want to cover anything. What you are doing is you are painting over the black and beige and what happens if you look at that is the tones comes up behind it.
So, it actually looks like you have done the painting completely. Be sure not to use any whites when you do this, any opaque color will actually cover up the black and you don’t want to do that. I will give you an example on the red. It will actually make the shading come right through by painting it and this is what you do first with your Allaprima.
You do a wash over your whole painting, after you do the black, red and white. Okay, let that dry and then what you do then is you build up your color. Then you can start mixing your colors. Let’s say for example you wanted to darken the sides of this red for example over here.
So I am going to use a little red and blue and you paint over that after it dries to build up the color and now what you do is you start adding your yellow to your red and make it a lighter red, and that is what goes in the center part and then you blend these okay. This is a very good technique to start with and its an easier way to paint and I am sure you will like the results.
Source : Expert Village