Geraldine Georges inspired experimentation

Geraldine Georges is a Belgium illustrator and graphic designer who uses a combination of illustration and photography. Her images consist of most commonly portraits adorned with shapes and objects such as flowers, bold black lines and areas. In some of her illustrations animals are included as either extras or to become part of the form. 

Below is my hand made attempt of creating an image inspired by Geraldine Georges. I used different materials such as ink, pens and paper. I splatted and dotted the ink around the page then tipped it up and blew the ink so that the ink could spread. I cut around a photograph then cut into it, I wasn't paying particular attention to detail except for when cutting around the eye. As I had a limited amount of time to create this it was hard to make it quite creative so it had to be kept simple but still with comparisons to Geraldine Georges work.

 

Photoshop Experiments

This was my first attempt at using Photoshop to create a Geraldine Georges inspired image.
 To create this I followed a Photoshop tutorial.

1. open the desired photograph into Photoshop, and create a new blank A4 document.
2. Drag the photograph onto the blank document. Holding down shift, re-size the photograph so that it is fairly small.
3. Using the lasso tool or the magnetic lasso tool draw around the area of the picture that you want. To select more than one part hold down shift and select another area.
4. Hold ctrl and click the mouse and click select inverse. press delete then deselect.
5. Using the eraser tool eliminate areas of the image that you don't like, also using the magic want tool so that it snaps to specific parts for a cleaner eraser.
6. Create a new layer. Using the shape tool for a circle for example, draw where you want the shape to be. Drag this layer to below the image so that it will appear behind it. fill the shape black.
7. Create a new layer. Click on the brushes icon and experiment with using the different types to see what works well with the image. As it is as a new layer you can delete it and start again without deleting the photograph.
8. Add colour with the different brushes depending on what works well with the photograph. 

This was my first attempt of adding colour. To begin with I didn't want to add colour as I thought it spoils the photograph, but as I added more colour and drip marks I think that colour added another element to the image. (image below).

I liked the hands on approach to creating a Geraldine Georges inspired piece as I could make it how I wanted it without any obstacles such as brushes. Photoshop however can lead to more creative ideas and colours. The brushes available can vary and for specific brushes they can be downloaded. After doing the two I now think that I prefer Photoshop as its more creative with brushes however it is very time consuming and harder to draw accurate shapes with a cursor. I resorted to using software called X-pen, it allows you to freely draw on a pad which is like drawing on paper which appears on screen.