I’ve been looking at the book Alla Prima by Richard Schmid lately. After looking through the book and reading about half of it, I decided to try a study in Burnt Sienna, something that Richard Schmid does to great effect in the book.

I found Richard Schmid’s Burnt Sienna studies to be impressive because of the limiting factor - it’s hard, in my experience, to use a single color, especially if several other colors are on-hand.

In making this painting of my toddler, what I found to be the most difficult part was not getting out a second color like pthalo blue and utilizing it to make the shadows darker.

The Sienna study also turned out to be instructive in wiping away areas to make them a lighter value. Since I don’t use turpentine in general, the whitest whites could be made by wiping and using dry sponges to remove paint.

I’ll aim to do a few more Burnt Sienna studies over time - next time I think I’ll try it out on canvas to see if I can get the same textural moments as some of the Richard Schmid pieces I saw in his book. This piece was on a Ampersand Gessobord panel, which worked really well for wipe-away techniques. In all, I really enjoyed this exercise and it challenged me considerably.