Timed Lay-In
A strict time limit on the initial compositional and tonal block-in—typically thirty minutes—as a discipline against over-refinement at the foundation stage.
The most famous version is Howard Pyle's "kill at a hundred yards" rule: the thirty-minute lay-in had to read as a coherent picture at distance before any refinement was permitted. If the block-in did not kill at a hundred yards, the picture was scraped and restarted rather than corrected. The discipline solves a specific failure mode—the painter who polishes the eyelash before the head is in the right place. A tight time limit forces the foundational decisions to be made at the scale they live at: the whole picture, read from across the studio. The Brandywine lineage (N.C. Wyeth, Cornwell, Harvey Dunn) carried this forward. Alla-prima painters across traditions—Sargent, Sorolla, Zorn—use an informal version of the same rule, committing the compositional architecture in a single sitting before any polishing begins.