Does anyone post or show personally their paintings to anyone?? I always post my finished results on facebook with very limited results...zero comments and one or two likes. I suppose it's because no on is interested in paintings.
The only place other than that is here. It's alot of work and effort with such little praise. I DO appreciate what i get on here. In the end, it's just do it for yourself, i know, but that seems almost counter-productive in a way. If i were on a isolated island and got to where i was doing really great work, I would be trying to comprehend the whole time, i wish SOMEONE could see my work! That will never end. I don't know if anyone can do it completely "for themselves".
With your drawing, Pat! I have a drawing table, too! I line up my cups of drawing stuff- graphite pencils, charcoal pencils, mechanical pencils and erasers on the ledge. Under the lid I have all the sketch pads and toned paper of gray and tan pads. My son-in-law, Emily’s dad, found the table a few years ago on the sidewalk left for bulk pick up and it was in good condition, so he delivered it to my house! But Emily never used it and never comes anymore to do art here. She’s busy applying to colleges and will graduate this year. We both started drawing together before moving on to painting, but I think it’s good to take breaks from paint to work with pencils/charcoal. I have nice charcoal pencils and charcoal vine sticks, too. It helps with simplifying composition and improving our sense of working with gradation of values, light-dark contrasts. It’s been 3 months now that I’ve gone back to drawing off and on, mostly off, since the time I drew a horse that I couldn’t paint. I covered it up twice and started to paint flamingos, but got stuck on drawing them in a composition. I’m still practicing with pencil how to draw their funny skinny legs and the canvas is waiting.So you have fun with your charcoal drawings, OK? It is simpler to work without colors. For now. . . ~Liz
Cleaned up my room yesterday and put in closet alot of paintings hanging around. Of course, i had to add touches to every one. Didn't get into a downward spiral though. It is so amazing in a way to have that fresh look and see emmediately what it needs. I think I might have a short attention span when i am working more than half hour or so. I'm no longer sure about my judgement of values. I've gotten to where I'm absolutely blind and i KNOW it. I can't see nothing anymore. Nothing but self doubt. But anyway, the charcoal thing seems like it might work better without color getting in the way. I'm sure color really confuses the mind when you're striving to get accurate value. And if you keep persisting like i do on things, you just end up with all the color/value relationships of the painting becoming so off that it ends up in total frustration. I think we all think, "I know better than this". Yea, i THINK i do, but I constantly change every brush stroke because i tell myself, nope, i was wrong about that when i thought i was sure.That pre-visualizing doesn't work as well as one might think. Liz, you know I'm an over analyzer anyway and into detail, so charcoal is probably more my medium. I think you "get there" alot faster than painting, and because of that, you wont' tend to over analyze quite as much. I WILL, but not as much.