Jessie Lilac Blog

Pink flowers on a hot day. The owl I painted on a windy day. The cardigan I finished on a wet and rainy day. Pink and purple.

 This week's word for Illustration Friday is 'lonely'.  Of course you don't need to be alone to feel lonely. What do you think, Mr Seagull?

Dragonflies  (available as a print here ) It stops me in my tracks when I see a dragonfly. That doesn't happen very often, so when I saw this one, I had to get my camera out and capture it before it flew right away! They're lovely shapes to draw and I can imagine I'll be drawing more before too long. :) I spotted another lovely shaped object, this amazing seedhead and something else that caught my eye. Beautifully curved, lipstick pink flower petals, almost transparent in the sunshine. I love the silhouette of the stems of this plant with its bright pink flower heads against the dark green of the yew. (I'm not great at knowing plant names -sorry!) But I do know that the almost ghostlike plant behind it is love-in-the-mist. I'm growing some in my garden but they're still very tiny at the moment. All that rain has confused my poor seedlings and now the sun is hot to trot, they may well bloom after all! Have a lovely we...

As you might have seen from my last post, I recently visited the isle of Skye. The shop above was north of the island, standing alone in quite a remote place. I was drawn by the woolly loveliness inside but to my surprise the lady in the shop was from where we live, over 600 miles south! She'd moved up there a few years ago. I was tempted by their wonderful array of naturally dyed wool and handmade buttons and cards. Not sure what I'm going to do with these yet but I'm getting a whole lotta pleasure just getting them out of the bag and day-dreaming about their future. ;) A little highland cow picture made from the local wool. I love that gorgeous russet colour! It had been dyed using the natural colours from madder and onion skins. I had to buy some for myself. :) Aren't these ceramic buttons beautiful? I'm going to have to knit something blue for them now aren't I? Talking of which, I've nearly finished the purple cardigan...

 Thankyou for all your helpful comments when my laptop met its demise last week. It still lies dormant but I think there might yet be a way of retrieving lost things. A big thankyou and welcome to new followers too! I've just come back from a few days away so I hope you didn't feel too abandoned by me. ;) To make up for it I'm doing a longer than usual post to share with you the most amazing images I've been enjoying over the last few days. Now remember I don't have Photoshop any more and so have no way of 'tweaking' these pictures to exaggerate the colours, so what you see here is just as it came straight off the camera! So pull up a chair, pour yourself a nice cup of tea (or coffee!) and be amazed .... I've been away to the isle of Skye in Scotland. Can you believe the colours in this picture?! This was 10 o'clock one evening, yes, I said 10 o'clock in the evening. The sun didn't set until 11! Remember I don't have ...

I have no new pictures to show you and feel quite lost not being able to upload any but something happened that's stopped me in my tracks. My laptop died last night. Along with it went all my saved photos and painting jpgs since the beginning of time. All of them. I remember thinking to myself after an afternoon of Photoshopping I should put it all on a memory stick in case something like this happens. :( Well today was going to be a lovely post about my beautiful picture that arrived from Micki at The Secret Hermit . I was the lucky winner of her recent blog give-away. Yesterday morning I took photos as I unwrapped the pretty packaging adorned with birds and flowers so that I could share my excitement with you. She is gorgeous! I'm afraid you're going to have to take my word for it at the moment but to my mind, it's the best one of all Micki's paintings and that's saying something. When I get a chance I'll show her here for you all to enjoy. :) ...

A few weeks ago I showed you these works in progress that I'm painting for my exhibition at the end of the summer. I had quite a struggle with these, going round in circles, layering, changing, not seeming to get anywhere. The painting on the right had a previous life. It used to look like this.. I was happy with it like this because I like the textures and thought it had a floaty watery feel to it. I was so sure it was finished I even put hangers on the back. But for some reason, who knows what, I decided it needed a figure on it, so this is how the finished painting looks now... The left hand side hasn't changed much but you can see the differences elsewhere. (The watermark along the bottom I added on the computer, it's not on the actual painting.) As for the other painting, I almost painted it over completely because all the way through the process it looked so wrong to me. In particular,that odd looking shape beneath the bird was bugging m...