A great technique in starting still life paintings is a technique like alla prima, or finish as you go painting. If you are familiar with the Still Life Painter, Richard Schmidt, this is how he does it. First, you put a tone down and then start in one little section, usually the center of interest, and then paint until it is done as the painting essentially grows and grows from one edge to the other until the painting is completely done. It is a beautiful way to work because everything is fresh but not all of us can get that finished look immediately in our still life paintings. We need to work on the painting, let it set up a little bit and then work on it a little more to get it to look as good as Richard Schmid does after just a few minutes.
The down side of starting still life paintings in this fashion, for instance, is say you are painting my face as a portrait, and you work on the eyes, and then on the nose, but then on break my head drifts. If you don’t catch that my eyes and nose will be painted one way and my chin will be painted another. It will look distorted. I like this technique because the beauty of it is that the painting looks good all the way through. It may start out slow, because you are starting in such a small area and growing slowly but what you do have looks good. And, for me, when a painting gets out of control that is when I put it on the shelf and decide to finish it later – sometimes even after a year has gone by. Whereas, with this technique, you stay pretty excited all the way through it. There is a saying in painting “a good brush stroke is momentum for the next brush stroke” and that is really true of this technique and essentially it is true of all techniques for still life paintings.