Portrait Painting in Oil

Alla Prima
Portrait Painting

The most direct path to a painted portrait. Wet into wet, one session, no layers waiting to dry — learn to capture a face before the paint moves.

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The hardest thing
in oil painting

Portrait painting tests every technical skill at once: colour accuracy under pressure, the ability to judge values correctly, edge control, and the discipline to commit to large shapes before reaching for detail.

Alla prima — painting wet-into-wet in a single session — strips away the safety net of overpainting. Every mark you make is working in or against the wet paint beneath it. That constraint is also what makes alla prima portraits so alive.

Done well, the paint itself tells the story of the sitting: you can see the painter's decisions, the confidence, the speed. It's the technique behind Sargent, Zorn, and most of what makes 19th-century portraiture so compelling.

The alla prima process,
step by step

  1. I
    Lay in the ground tone Toning the canvas before you begin — a warm mid-value ground gives you something to paint against and eliminates the intimidation of white canvas.
  2. II
    Block in the large shapes Halftone of the face, shadow masses, hair. No detail yet — just getting the proportions and value structure right at a large scale.
  3. III
    Establish the lights The lightest light areas go in while the ground is still wet. This is where colour temperature starts to matter — warm lights, cooler shadows, or the reverse depending on your light source.
  4. IV
    Work the edges Lost and found edges are what separate a portrait from an illustration. Hard edges where form turns sharply, soft where it dissolves. This step requires restraint.
  5. V
    Reserve the details Eyes, lips, the specific marks of likeness — these come last, placed into wet paint with confidence. Fussing at this stage is what kills portraits.

The technical problems
most painters face

Muddy skin tones

Usually a palette problem — too many colours mixed together, or working in too much medium too early. Learn a skin tone system built on a limited palette.

Lost likeness

Likeness lives in the halftones and shadow edges, not the lights. Most painters spend too long on the lit areas and lose the portrait in the transitions.

Overworked paint

Wet-into-wet only works if you're decisive. Reworking the same area more than twice lifts the underlayer and creates the grey, dead surface that plagues alla prima beginners.

Tight, hesitant marks

Comes from working too small, or using a brush that's too small for the stage you're in. Learn to use the largest brush you can get away with for each phase.

"Paint the air around the form, not just the form itself."

What MasterDemos
teaches differently

Every portrait demonstration at MasterDemos is recorded with narration that explains the decisions in real time — not a post-hoc explanation of a finished painting, but the actual reasoning as it happens.

You'll see the mistakes, the corrections, the moments where the painting gets worse before it gets better. That process — the working-through — is the most valuable thing to witness and the hardest thing to find in recorded instruction.

Portrait demos cover a range of subjects, lighting conditions, and palette choices. Whether you're working from a live model, a reference photo, or imagination, the technical foundations are the same.

Start painting
portraits that hold

Access the full MasterDemos library and begin building the technical foundation your portraits need.

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