I was fortunate enough to attend Patrick Byrnes's workshop at London Fine Art Studios. Patrick taught us many strategies for alla prima portrait painting, focusing primarily on his technique for capturing accurate, richly chromatic colour.
The whole 5-day course was excellent. The demonstrations and lectures, along with Patrick's general attitude, were all incredibly inspiring. He has clearly worked very hard to find fresh, eloquent descriptions of how every aspect of painting & drawing works.
Wednesday, artificial light.
This was my first attempt at applying what we had learned to a full portrait. I was still internalising Patrick's colour technique, so I did a tentative thumbnail study to prove to myself that my mixes were okay. I left very little time to the actual painting, but after rushing through drawing & brush-work, my colours looked nice and coherent.
Thursday, natural light.
There were so many shapes and details in my drawing that proved irrelevant once painted over. I was attempting to bolster my lacking anatomical knowledge by finding more and more lines. Patrick was immediately able to point out flaws in my drawing's likeness without even checking against the model - some things were plain impossible.
Making corrections to an alla prima painting has an extremely low time cost. I was happy to find myself increasingly comfortable with the act of scraping off a fortuitously-beautiful, but wrongly-located passage, trusting that I would replace it with something objectively better.
Friday, artificial light.
It would be best to learn Patrick's methods from him directly, but my understanding was that the connected swatch 'mosaics' tested the relative dynamics between colours in a minimal-stakes context.
For this piece, my swatches unraveled into a tiny 'thumbnail' colour sketch - I had lured myself into pointlessly placing features!
After realising how much time I wasted, the method really clicked for me. I began to think of the swatches as a colour-connectivity-graph, instead of a low-resolution-portrait. I enjoyed imagining that any likeness to the pose was a purely mathematical side effect, indicating an accurately plotted neighborhood of colours... the truth was probably somewhere halfway.
Saturday, natural light.
The eyes ended up at the wrong angle, given the perspective of the other features. More motivation for me to focus on anatomical construction!
Learning alongside other adults reminded me how psychological the atelier method can be. Trying my hardest to really absorb Patrick's feedback left me with a four-painting-chart showing a huge growth in skills. Being a student involves being vulnerable, so I'm grateful to have had such a good teacher. I feel equipped to hold my work to a far higher standard than I had previously.
You can find Patrick's work, as-well as a list of upcoming workshops, at: patrickbyrnespaintings.com 👀