WET-ON-WET or ‘ALLA PRIMA‘ (direct painting)

Faced with your white ready-primed canvas, you may be perfectly happy just to pitch in and start applying paint, and to apply all of your paint before any of it has dried. This technique is widely known as ‘wet-on-wet’, or ‘alla prima’ which can be translated from Italian as ‘first attempt’ or ‘at once’. In French it was known as ‘au premier coup’. There is some confusion about the true meaning of ‘alla prima’ and whether it on strictly describes a painting completed in one session or not (this seems illogical because oil paint remains wet and workable for days) and also whether alla prima entails working in a single layer or not. Some will argue that it can still encompass a painting made with a degree of layering as long as paint was applied over other paint that wasn’t yet dry.

Regardless, if you want to work in this very quick and direct way without any background colour and perhaps no sketching out then you have the option to either apply your paints wet-on-wet in one of two ways – either wet into wet, or wet onto wet. You’ll get a very liquid, fluid effect that can sometimes be a little flat with no underpainting colour humming through other layers.

With direct painting if you don’t actively want your colours to blend as you apply them to your canvas you’ll want to avoid making them too runny and oily. If working in a single layer you could thin your paint to your satisfaction with Liquin, Medium W or W&N’s Artist’s Painting Medium, or just with a little spirits. If you want to thin your paint a great deal then you need to balance any spirits added with some oil to avoid your paint becoming unbound, and if you want to paint wet over wet in any substantially layered way then you’ll need to follow the Fat overlean rule. People painting alla prima often like to paint quite thickly and opaquely.

One last point to make is that there’s no reason you can’t apply some coloured underlayers, and then a single layer of wet-on-wet paint above. Many layered paintings will have some wet-on-wet work especially in their final layer of paint. Most Impressionist paintings give the impression of having been executed alla prima with wet paint but in fact most have either underlayers or blocky underpainting beneath. If you have the opportunity to look at paintings by Claude Monet close up you’ll notice that he uses loosely scumbled paint over more controlled and dried paint layers beneath.