Colors of Greek Streets

I've never done any series except for paper dolls of 4 musketeers and their ladies and clothes for them - when I was a child! So this is my first. I was happy to accept the challenge from the artist Anne Livingston on YouTube and join a very friendly group of other artists who are doing the same thing.  The series of the group of artists which joined from all corners of the world is called "Series Under the Same Sky".

My theme: Greek Streets

Why? Because Greece was my home for a certain period of my life. And also because when thinking about what would be my theme I remembered this photograph from my first Greek stay and felt like painting it and I knew I had many more so it was a good material for my series. It became a journey back in time, remembering old stories and confronting my younger self with my current self. Traveling was my biggest wish before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Greece was the first foreign country where I lived and studied for a longer period. I now speak the language and know a lot about their culture. Another reason why I chose streets is the fact that I've been painting streets since I was 17. My first being actually my first big painting in oil. You can see an older version of it in my Gallery section "Cityscapes - Europe & World". It is called "Road to Heaven".

Why these photographs? I went through all my numerous photo albums from Greece and these simply caught my eye. They have a good composition material, they are quite different from each other, they represent ordinary and more popular places, they are places with a lot of memories or just one fleeting moment. They are very Greek while the colors are very much mine.  Actually one of my oldest greek friends told me that "I've got a piece of Greece in me and that it shows" ... 

My media: since I'm currently painting only in digital, I used my iPad and the Procreate app. I chose three brushes: shading graphite, wet acrylic and gouache. I used each on two paintings. Always only one brush for sketching, painting, erasing or blending of one painting. 

My color palettes: I chose two from color palettes which I'd created in a traditional way on a color wheel in Procreate. They differ from each other, one is warmer the other has both cold and warm colors. One of them came from the colors of my old drawing done during that first time I was in Greece and the other one is based on colors from my grandfather's painting of my grandmother. Everything is very connected.

The paintings are presented in the order they were created. I might add another 2 to 4 to make it 10, as I originally planned, later.