This month I took my first oil painting class with Aaron Coberly. Specifically, it was "Painting the Alla Prima Figure". Aaron Coberly's style looks very loose and almost chaotic to me. Yet he somehow manages to pull it together to create beautiful and intriguing portraits. I really like it and I originally thought I wouldn't have too much trouble mimicking what he does and getting decent results. What hubris on my part. The class made me realize blending and rendering things nicely is not exactly important, and that is what I tend to focus on. One reason Aaron Coberly has such nice results is that he is very accurate in terms of feature and shape placement - he doesn't spend his time slowly blending one color to the next like I try to do.
I learned a lot in the class and I've been trying to apply what he taught to some drawings:
