Day One
Drawing, Composition & Block-in
Morning Lecture
Who was Joaquín Sorolla?
- Brief biography
- His training in Valencia and Rome
- Velázquez’s influence
- Bastien-Lepage and Impressionism
- Why Sorolla was not an Impressionist
- The importance of drawing beneath apparent spontaneity
Technical Discussion
Understanding Sorolla’s process
- Composition before color
- Simplification of large masses
- Seeing values before details
- Designing movement
- The importance of edges
Morning
- Transferring the drawing
- Correcting proportions
- Simplifying the design
- Large value organization
Afternoon
Students
- Refine drawing
- Transfer to canvas
- Begin monochromatic block-in (grisaille or warm neutral underpainting)
- Establish major light and shadow masses
Day Two
First Color Layer
Morning Lecture
Sorolla’s Color
Topics
- High-key painting
- Warm and cool relationships
- Local color vs perceived color
- Painting light rather than objects
Discussion of pigments
- Lead White (or Titanium substitute)
- Yellow Ochre
- Naples Yellow
- Cadmium Yellow
- Vermilion
- Cadmium Red
- Alizarin
- Ultramarine
- Cobalt
- Viridian
- Ivory Black
Morning
Beginning color
How Sorolla:
- established large color masses
- avoided details
- kept paint fresh
- mixed directly on the palette
- preserved harmony
Afternoon
Students establish
- major color relationships
- light families
- shadow families
- atmosphere
Focus
“No details.”
Day Three
Building Light
Morning Lecture
The Architecture of Light
Understanding
- reflected light
- color temperature
- transitions
- lost and found edges
- atmosphere
How sunlight changes color.
Morning
Developing the painting
- Connecting planes
- Strengthening form
- Breaking color
- Creating vibration
- Brush economy
Afternoon
Students continue
Focus on
- modeling forms
- improving color relationships
- maintaining freshness
Day Four
Refinement Without Losing Freshness
Morning Lecture
The Greatest Danger
Overpainting
Topics
- Knowing when to stop
- Editing
- Brushstroke hierarchy
- Visual rhythm
- Suggestion versus description
Study examples from
- Beach scenes
- Portraits
- Gardens
Morning
Selective refinement
- focal points
- accents
- edge control
- broken color
- thick versus thin paint
Afternoon
Students refine
without tightening the entire painting.
Day Five
Finishing & The Poetry of Light
Morning Lecture
Why Sorolla Still Matters Today
Discussion
- Contemporary realism
- Painting experience rather than photography
- Emotional impact of light
- Painting atmosphere
- Finding one’s own voice
Morning
Final adjustments
- color accents
- highlights
- edge adjustments
- unifying the painting
- final evaluation
Afternoon
Students complete their paintings.
Individual critiques
Group critique
Professional advice on continuing the study of Sorolla.
Throughout the Workshop Students Will Learn
- Understanding natural light
- Simplifying complex scenes
- Strong composition
- Value organization
- Color harmony
- High-key painting
- Brush economy
- Broken color
- Warm and cool relationships
- Atmospheric perspective
- Edge control
- Visual movement
- Painterly brushwork
- Finishing without overworking
Everyday we will discuss:
- How does Sorolla lead the viewer’s eye?
- Where is the highest chroma, and where is it deliberately restrained?
- Which passages are described with just a few confident strokes?
- How are warm and cool temperatures orchestrated to suggest sunlight?
- What role do edge quality and lost-and-found contours play in creating atmosphere?
- If we reduced the painting to four or five value masses, would it still read convincingly?
This exercise trains students to see like painters, transforming museum masterpieces into practical lessons that they can immediately apply at the easel. It also reinforces the central aim of the workshop: not to copy Sorolla’s style, but to understand the artistic decisions that made his paintings so luminous and enduring.
