Azure Dragonfly Meanderings

The everyday art and inspiration of artist Jennifer Georgeadis.

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July 28, 2017

Sketchbook

Today’s blog is a bit of a throwback from work I created in an acrylic painting class I took last fall. Although I enjoy painting abstract, this piece is a bit of a departure from the way I usually work, in that I had no reference imagery or initial shapes to start from. I began with an orange-toned canvas, and worked intuitively from that point on. This painting is also unusual for me in that it took only a couple of hours to complete - just enough time to paint it within the allotted class time.

July 25, 2017

Sketchbook

Every once in a while I like to work with simple geometric shapes in my paintings. I find creating compositions with simple shapes becomes a meditative experience, where nothing is planned too much ahead of time, and the composition evolves as shapes are placed. I started this painting by drawing ellipses and circles using plastic drafting stencils placed over my Wacom tablet. Once I had a composition I was happy with, I decided on a limited colour palette and made colour decisions as I went along, using dark and light values to push shapes forward and backward as needed.

July 18, 2017

Sketchbook

Well, it’s been a couple days of not-so-great results for my caricature practice, but I’m persisting. I think that part of my problem has been trying to get too precise about likeness in the initial thumbnail sketches, and ignoring what the thumbnail sketches are meant to achieve, which is to highlight key shapes and features.
Sometimes it’s also difficult to decide which features are the ones that make a face instantly recognizable. The eyes may be striking, but it’s really the mouth that defines that person. I’ve found it helpful to block out the eyes, nose and mouth separately until I see the one feature that really makes the face.
This caricature of Matt Damon definitely could have been pushed further, but I was happy with how it progressed from the initial thumbnails to the colour version:

July 14, 2017

Sketchbook

Today, I’m playing with caricatures. Besides being just plain fun, it’s a great way to hone portrait-drawing skills because it trains the eye to recognize what features make a person recognizable. I’ve started with a few fast thumbnail sketches (yes, the first was a total disaster!), experimenting with different exaggerations with each one. I know I can get a lot more extreme with these caricature drawings, but today has been a good warm-up to that.

July 11, 2017

Sketchbook

Throughout the year I make greeting cards for friends and family. This one was a simple design that was easy to make with a heart-shaped hole-punch. Here’s a video of my process:

July 7, 2017

Sketchbook

Here is another negative painting using complimentary colours. I approached this one in a slightly different way, paring down the shapes and details of a rather complex composition until I was left with a balanced focal point. This required knocking back some strong colour and large shapes until I was happy with what remained.

July 4, 2017

Sketchbook

For this digital painting I used as reference a scene from season four of Ripper Street. I’ve noticed that this season the show’s use of light and colour is eye-popping, and an early scene with Queen Victoria inspired me to do this study:

June 30, 2017

Sketchbook

This image will likely look familiar, as I’ve used it a few times before for a number of different paintings. I thought that since I was practising painting for speed, using a very familiar image might be helpful.
This line and wash painting took much less time than the last one, and because I didn’t belabour the details in the brush work, I ended up with some nice, expressive elements.

June 27, 2017

Sketchbook

This was one piece in a series of line-and-wash watercolours that I painted for speed. Although it took longer than ideally planned, I’m happy with the results.

June 23, 2017

Sketchbook

For a long time I’ve been meaning to do a painting of Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia using some personal photos from our trip as reference. One particular photo has always been my favourite, and doing a digital coloured charcoal drawing on black paper seemed like the perfect way to capture the intensity of the colours in the shot.
I’ve recorded my drawing process for this piece so you can see how I created it:

This was the reference photo I was working from:

Here is the finished drawing:

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