Painting Alla Prima of the yellow lily. An oil painting demonstration.

Here's an Alla Prima oil painting I've been wanting to do for a while, but wasn't sure I could pull it off. My usual method is the flemish layered technique, and I haven't tried one of these in years. Nothing like getting your feet wet, right? No practice, just a little planning to think about the subject and how to mix my colors.

Lets get started!

This is a fairly long demonstration, so I'll split it up on 2 pages. As described on an earlier page, we start with a sketch of the subject matter.
In this case, we're using a photo of a single yellow day lily that has some spectacular highlights that I hope I can develop.

Below are the colors I'll be starting out with. I could have toned the canvas with a yellow acrylic before the pencil sketch, (this would help push the yellows to a brighter intensity) but because of the photography, I wanted you to see the sketch better.

Next we have our oil painting mixed for what I feel I'll be needing the most of. I will also be doing some blending on the canvas too.

I start with mixing my greens, a light and a dark using the cad yellow and prussian blue to get these. More yellow for a light green, more blue for a dark green.
The yellow start with open yellow, then progressively adding more ochre and burnt umber to darken. The lightest yellow is open yellow with white.

My brown for background sticks and stems is burnt umber and yellow ochre.

The prepared black is 2 parts black, 1 part umber, 1/8 part blue.