Lots of artwork to share this month and I will be posting some of the interesting stuff I've been working on. My aim was to get away from acrylic painting for a while and concentrate on some of my other artistic talents. Pastels, watercolor and charcoal drawing as well as graphite. I'm in the middle of a pastel drawing of a family of elephants and have done or have in process several watercolors of sunflowers and other floral paintings both landscape and still life I will share with you, or you can view them at http://kandakis.DeviantArt.com/gallery. Normally, my supply keeps up with my ability to produce, but I believe I can do more.
I'm still trying to get organized with my supplies. As I get more, the supply bin gets obsolete and I have to rethink the organization. If I don't stay organized I can't enable the thought processes enough to concentrate on ideas and concepts for the next work. Having free shipping with my online account makes it easy to order a bunch or one thing at a time without being too expensive even though the art supply store is only one block away (its a long block); And, I really hate to wait in line during the holiday season.
This month I also want to pare down choices for color to the basic primary three, maybe an extended palette on those choices. Mixing colors is very important and you really don't need 50 colors to paint a painting, that's just clever advertising on the part of the art supply dealer telling you that you really need those (maybe newbies). After all, they're in the retail business. The problem with a limited palette, I find, is being able to create optical blacks and really rich dark colors. I don't use black by itself, and sometimes mix a transparent black to darken or mute a tone. It really creates a cool green if you mix with any yellow, so its convenient.
I learned this month that if you don't keep your work flat in front of you on the easel it can result in false interpretations of the subject. That explains a lot about my past drawings being out of proportion no matter how much I tried to fix them.
So, keeping those sable brushes handy...back to work, so much to do, so little time.
