Azure Dragonfly Meanderings

The everyday art and inspiration of artist Jennifer Georgeadis.

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February 22, 2018

Sketchbook

In this next stage of the painting I darkened and intensified my blue glaze and started to work a few large shapes into the background:

At this point I liked the shapes that I was working with, but the painting’s focal point was unclear. At this stage I began to knock back a few shapes with a dark wash so that the focal point in the upper right of the painting became more obvious:

After I took a fresh look at the painting I realized that I needed to sharpen up a few shapes and work in a bit more visual texture. I was also unhappy with the arrow-shaped leaves on the right side of the composition, which looked indistinct and were a bit confusing.
In the next blog post I’ll show the changes I made to fix those areas.

February 19, 2018

Sketchbook

I’ve launched into another, larger negative painting. Here is the underpainting I started with. I was careful to keep the tonal values light and to include plenty of interesting texture:

In my first layer of negative painting I kept the dark blue glaze thin, cutting around the lightest shapes:

With the next step I increased the pigment in the blue glaze and cut in the mid-to-light shapes:

The most challenging part of these first steps is preventing the glazes from getting too dark, too soon. In my next blog I’ll show the next stages of the painting as I work in more negative shapes and start to develop the background.

February 16, 2018

Sketchbook

Here’s another wood carve design I’ve been playing with, this time done with a bit more precision in a digital program. Sometimes it’s fun to play with crisp geometric shapes, and planning this digitally allowed me to experiment with four colour fills for tonal variety:

February 13, 2018

Sketchbook

I’ve been doing quite a bit more research into wood carving sculpture, and trying to decided whether to use hand carving tools or small power tools. In the meantime, I’ve been sketching out a couple more design possibilities:

February 9, 2018

Sketchbook

Another quick pastel painting, this time on black pastel paper:

February 6, 2018

Sketchbook

For a little break in my negative painting schedule I decided to try a soft pastel painting to stretch my artistic skills. I began with a quick sketch on toned paper to lay in shapes:

Next, I worked from the darkest colours to the lightest to develop the scene. I struggled a bit with the texture of the paper because it was difficult to get solid, dense areas of colour in such a small format. I worked around it anyway, smudging the colour a bit as I went and then building up more saturated colours at the very last stage:

February 2, 2018

Sketchbook

In the next stage of the painting I cut in around a few more shapes, then intensified the darks where needed. Some of the larger shapes needed a wash of yellow to balance out the colour and provide a bit more visual interest:

The next step was to recover a few of the lights, as the painting, when viewed in grayscale was getting a bit too dark. I used a couple of mid-tone blue colours to create some space and light in the top left corner of the painting:

I extended the blue down into the bottom left corner and into the centre of the painting for balance. Then, I reassessed the range of values again and added a couple more tints of blue paint to push the background even farther back:

This step helped the composition quite a bit, but it’s worth mentioning that this painting photographed a lot lighter than it looks in person. The red shapes in the foreground read as quite light when they’re really only a mid-tone. I’m not quite ready to call it finished until I’m certain that I have a good range of darks and lights, so more tweaking may still be necessary.

January 31, 2018

Sketchbook

I’ve been planning several negative paintings over the past few months, and after the Christmas rush I had a chance to get down to actually painting them. This is the first of the series.
I’ve stuck with a limited colour palette of primary colours for this painting. My underpainting was a warm wash of reds and yellows, with a little blue mixed in here and there for variety. The first step was to cut in the lightest shapes using a wash of dark blue. These initial shapes, for the most part, remained untouched throughout the development of the painting:

This next stage shows the painting after the second group of shapes were cut in. After I painted each stage, I spritzed the still-tacky painted surface with plain water, then brushed away the drops to retain some interesting texture from the underpainting:

I used a darker blue wash for this stage in order to add depth and define edges:

In the next blog post I’ll show the final steps of the painting, and describe how I fixed some unexpected mistakes.

January 26, 2018

Sketchbook

For the past few months I’ve been tossing around ideas for wood sculptures or panels that incorporate carving, wood burning and resin pouring. I like the idea of these wood projects being a fairly intimate size – something that can easily be held in the hands.
At the moment I’m just playing around, sketching ideas and enjoying the precision of geometric designs that might translate well into sculpture. Here’s the initial sketch for a design I’ve been working on:

January 23, 2018

Sketchbook

For one of 2017’s Christmas projects, I took up the challenge of painting a rather tricky landscape: sunset on a cloudy mid-winter afternoon, just as the last rays of the sun were breaking through the clouds on the horizon. My reference photo captured the drama of the moment, where the tops of trees and bushes were lit in fiery colours while the rest of the landscape lay in shadow. Brilliant to see in person and to photograph, but ultimately pretty difficult to recreate on canvas!

One of the issues with the photo reference was that the areas in shadow were so dark and indistinct that three-quarters of the composition was a blur of mid-to-dark greys and browns. I reworked those areas to enhance the shapes and contrast. It was at this point that I realized what I loved most about the scene was the striking shapes and contrasting colour, so I decided to push the composition towards abstraction a bit more. With that in mind, here are the first two stages of the painting with initial shapes and colour worked onto an orange-red underpainting:

The lacy, fragile bushes in the foreground were shadowy and indistinct in my reference photo, so I intensified them to balance out my composition. When the shapes got too fussy, I painted over them and decided to incorporate some rough impasto to get the broken lines and texture I was looking for. The final stage was to intensify the shadows to create a bit more contrast against the brilliant reds and yellows. Here is the finished painting:

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