I'm about halfway done with taking an alla prima portrait painting workshop at the Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier led by Sean Cheetham, and here's my take on everything so far. (Please forgive the video quality! The best take that I did happened to be on my phone.)I mentioned the palette a few times, only because the class description made me very curious about the "mud palette" that Sean uses. I think that's just one of the signatures of  his style of painting and not some sort of trade secret type of thing. At least, I hope so. If not then I guess soon enough I'll be asked to delete this (if elements of this post suddenly disappear, you'll know why)! Anyway, here's a short overview of the colors we used in class:

And here are some progress pictures that I took throughout the day. In the second to last picture Sean stepped in to help me out a bit with some of the angles and the drawing.

The color quality is inaccurate, unfortunately. I tried my best to take a decent picture on my phone but it still didn't do the painting justice. But hopefully you still get the gist of it. The final day will be about me filling in the skintones in the light and then whatever other little details that I can quickly suggest by the end of the class. Right now the woman in the painting is looking really wrong and ghostly to me, but it's just because I know it's not done yet. I'm hoping that on the last day I'll be able to turn it around and get it looking like a human.

For the final results and recap, check out part 2 here.