Illustration Friday: Natural

I've spent a lot of time over the Easter weekend enjoying the countryside. This is one of my favourite views. I love the way the hills tumble towards the sea.

Wild flowers are popping out all over the place.

 Trees and the sea. Two of my favourite things together at the same time. :).

This week at Illustration Friday, the word prompt is 'Natural'. With nature all around me and of course what with Easter too, here's what I was inspired to paint.

Do you think the rabbits are talking about the sleeping girl? 

I wonder what they're saying?

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Fairytales and Painted Tissue

Here are my two latest paintings on canvas board.

The thing they have in common is that I've made them using a new technique (to me) where I painted the layers of paper collage beforehand. I've used coloured tissue in mixed media paintings before but the ones you can buy in the shops are each of one solid colour. I've enjoyed using the bought ones but this time, to give more interest and texture, I thought I'd colour them myself!

I'll show you what I did. :)

I used some off-cuts that I had of white tissue. I laid them out on some blue plastic to protect my long suffering floor, wetted them with a water spray, and added drops of ink onto the wet surface. They were very delicate at this stage, I know this because I tried to move one of them before it was dry and it started to disintegrate!

It was so tempting to hurry up the process! As it turned out, it didn't really matter too much because I wanted to tear it up anyway when I came to using it for my painting, so any random rips in the paper were fine.

I love how this purple paper turned out. I used iridescent purple ink which I thought might lose its shine after all this process but it didn't! :)

I had a bit of a practice in my sketchbook to see how it would look and how it would work when it was wetted again. I was pleased with the results, I like how the dark and shade on the tissue paper are random, so it gives me more freedom to experiment. I used PVA glue to stick it down with which is great to use because it gives strength to the layers as they dry. It's also a perfect surface for painting on top of too.

So let's fast forward to the final paintings.

Here's 'Morning Promise' that's now listed in my Etsy shop here.

And here's 'Two Wishes', which you can find in my shop here. :)

Thankyou for coming to visit me, I hope you find this interesting and maybe you'd like to try it for yourself? Any questions will be happily received! :)

Out in the Wild and Snug as a Bug

On a walk down a country lane,

Something purple caught my eye.

You might already know that my favourite colour is purple,

 it really was quite beautiful.

 I'd love to be one of those people who know all the names of everything I see in the wild, every flower, every bird, every tree. I'd like an App to be invented that could do this, wouldn't you? Not the Google Image Search with its outrageous suggestions that are almost never like the picture I put in the search box!

So until that App gets invented, does anyone know what the wild flower in my photo is called? :) **UPDATE** It's periwinkle! Thankyou kind people! :)

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I've been addicted to making colourful crocheted blankets over the past few months. I upload them to Ravelry so that I have some kind of record of what I've made. I've just popped over there to have a look to see how many and it's six (so far!)

Here's one I made a few weeks ago, for Eldest Daughter's new baby.

I did a bobble stitch in white around the edge.

And here he is all snuggled up in it! I would always swaddle my babies, it helped them to feel secure and they'd get off to sleep quicker. It's so lovely to see how Eldest daughter does the same. :)

Snug as a bug. :)

Some more Spring Magic

I showed you my latest painting 'Spring Magic' at the end of this post and the original mixed media painting on canvas board is now for sale on Etsy.

I just thought you might like to see it now that the design's in my Society6 shop too. :)

It's also available as a tote bag or a clock, a greetings card and even as a framed or unframed print!

Has the Spring magic worked for you yet? ;)

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Spring Magic is featured in 2 Etsy Tresuries ~  YaY thankyou! :)

https://www.etsy.com/treasury/NjEyNDQ4MnwyNzI1OTUyMzkw/spring-is-in-the-air

https://www.etsy.com/treasury/MzIwNDgzNDF8MjcyMzM5MTM2Nw/everything-revolves-around-her

It's Friday and the weekend beckons. Let's hope this horrible smog clears and we get some sunshine!

Have a good one. :)

xx

Take An Old Chest of Drawers

Take an old chest of drawers that is on its last legs, glue the parts together that have broken

and give it a new lease of life with some old paint you find in the shed. Never mind that the lid is rusted on, you can pick the bits of rust out of the paint before you begin. No one will ever know, unless you tell them. :)

Paint the drawer knobs with a jaunty sea-side design

and there you have a nice new piece of furniture for no cost at all. :)

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Thankyou to those of you who entered my giveaway on Facebook. The winner is Mandy

Congratulations Mandy!

Sorry to have missed out my bloggy friends on this occasion. Next time I do a giveaway I'll definitely have a blog one. You can be sure of that. :)

Jess x x

Lots of Bird Paintings and some Spring Magic!

I took a break from acrylics yesterday and got out my watercolours and black ink to make these cards for sale. :) They all have birds in them except one!

They're all listed in my Etsy shop, so hurry over there if you'd like to snap one (or two?) up!

Thinking about it, I've been drawing and painting birds a lot this week.

 In the picture above I've drawn with a black ink pen, over watercolour washes. I love how the page is really wet with the paint and then becomes a lovely surface to draw on once it's dry.

This one above is acrylic painted in my sketchbook with a teeny amount of pen here and there.

You know I said at the beginning of this post that I had a break from acrylics to paint the cards?
Well here's what I was working on.

It's mixed media on canvas board and I used one of my favourite paint colors! That pink is actually really bright pink, it's difficult to show how beautiful the colour is in the photo, it glows! It says fluorescent on the paint tube, the brighter the better I say. I was almost at the end of this painting when i knew there was something missing, a flying bird! I'm going to list it soon on Etsy.

It's called Spring Magic. :)

I wish you ♥ spring magic ♥  this weekend! xx

Another Giveaway and a New Painting For Spring

I could not believe my eyes earlier today when I saw that my likes on Facebook had jumped up to 900! As a thankyou I'm having a giveaway of one of my A4 prints.
All you need to do is to be a liker of my Facebook page and to share the post I have there about the giveaway on your own Timeline.You can choose any print from these above, so please leave me a comment underneath that post too so I know which one you'd like to win!

To see the prints in more detail, please click here.

I'll announce the winner on Monday, both here and on Facebook.

I've been working on a new painting for Spring. 

You might remember this sketch (below) I did a couple of weeks ago?

Well I kept finding myself turning the page of my sketchbook back to it because I love the colours. I just knew I had to do a painting based on it.

So here it is!

It's called 'The Song of Tulips' and is painted with acrylic on 7 x 10 canvas board. It's now available to buy in my Etsy shop. If you like to see more details, please click here.

Thankyou for visiting, I like painting the Spring theme so I shall be back very soon with more to show you. :)

xx

Crochet Colour Craze

Thankyou for your kind comments about my new paintings. :) I had quite a busy week last week so any new ideas for paintings that I had since then, were put on hold but hopefully this week, I should have more time.
Meanwhile, let me show you my latest crochet project.
Now if you have visited here before and are aware of my craze for bright colour, take a look in my bag of wool in the picture above. Do you see anything odd?

No?

Well it might not seem unusual for you but I bought some grey wool. Grey!

I think I must be influenced for the apparent fashion for grey everywhere at the moment, in paint, wallpaper, fabrics, carpets but my thinking is that it would set the other colours off nicely and make them seem even more bright! You can see I haven't altered the photo because the grey looks like grey and the yellow ZINGS out of the picture.

I find crocheting in the evenings very relaxing and as you may already know, I've made quite a few of these colourful blankets lately. I love to choose which colour I'm going to use for each stripe. I thought I'd run out of people to make these for but the other day my daughter-in-law-to-be happened to mention that she loves them so here we are. I've started making this one for her. ;)

I've updated the 'meet the owner' page in my Etsy shop and if you'd like to see it, please click here. :)

Bye for now, have a good week! xx