A Creative Community for Support and Accountability

I really believe it is important to have a group of people to work with that you are accountable to for creating any kind of artistic endeavor.  I have recently have had the opportunity to start getting together with a couple of friends who are interested in meeting once a week to work on watercolor techniques, urban drawing and their applications.  It has been a great experience for several reasons.
1)  It is nice to get someones opinion on what they like or would do different on a work of art.  We are not judgemental.  We simply have personal preferences.  Sometimes a comment will give me an idea on to how to proceed or what to do different the next time on a particular piece I am working on.
2)  We learn from each other.  We share ideas, techniques, experiences and advice.
3)  It provides a supportive, comfortable environment to create art in.
4) It also provides accountability.   Knowing that I am going to be seeing my two friends will make me think of what I wish to share with them from the work I have accomplished that preceding week.
I am sure there are other advantages if I thought about it longer but for now, those are the ones that come to mind immediately.

I have included an image of a work I am in the process of finishing of a urban sketch I did outside a local restaurant in Mason City, Iowa called Northwest Steak House.  It is a sculpture of a Greek Goddess at night against the brick wall of the building.   I took liberty with the blue of the sculpture, it being night and the light not very good.  The sculpture was located on the side of the building in the parking lot.  It consisted of a pencil drawing, ink overlay and then watercolor. I still need to darken the shadow and finish painting the grout in the brick. 
 I will be sharing this with my watercolor group this Thursday.

Color Schemes Made Easy for Design Work

The book Color Index XL was written by Jim Krause who has already written two other books on color schemes.  This is a book with a simple system to select color schemes to use in graphic design or artistic works.  Each page has four variations of a color scheme of five colors.  The page is divided into the different color variations bright, light muted and dark with the CMYK and RGB numbers that can be plugged into the computer.  

The book is divided into an introduction on how best to use the book and then the book spends some time on color theory in general: hue, saturation and value.  Finally, the book is divided into three additional chapters:  warmer palettes, mixed palettes and cooler palettes. I think a great advantage of this book is to see the colors on the printed page instead of on the computer screen.  

The book contains over 1,100 palettes of colors and is an excellent resource book to add to any designer's collection.  I highly recommend this book as a great idea sourcebook for color references.  I wrote this honest review for Blogging for Books as I received a free copy for doing so.