Jessie Lilac Blog

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. :) :¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦: 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

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 phot...

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...

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 blank...

Evening Peace, acrylic on canvas board. Gosh! After that very unusual post from yesterday, I'm pleased to see you still here! Let me show you  my new artwork. Glittering Stars, acrylic on canvas board. I love sparkly things don't you? I had a lot of fun adding the shiny gold to these two new paintings. You can't really tell from the photo above but  if they're held towards the light, they sparkle!  Each one measures 7 x 10 inches and I've listed the originals on  Etsy at £40. That's roughly about $66 to my USA friends. I do worldwide shipping and any currency is taken. :) If you'd like these designs on a mug or a cushion (pillow), or maybe a tote bag or a phone case? Here's a screenshot of my Society6 shop . Please pop over and have a look. :) You can even get this one as a clock! So which one would you choose? :) Thankyou for looking! xx

There was a time when my main art form was sculpture. I was doing an art degree and was told by a tutor that 'painting wasn't my strength' and to concentrate on 3D. The work above is made from a fur lined board with cast papier mache  baby heads, each one slightly different from the other. If you've only ever seen my recent 'whimsical' paintings this post might surprise you. I was at art college at the time, in my final year and as part of that course, I organised a workshop at Colston's Girls' School in Bristol. I'd just about forgotten all about it until Middle Daughter asked me what had happened to my pea pods. They must have had an effect on her at the time, poor little thing! At college I found myself making art that I didn't particularly like, I threw a lot of it on a skip at the end of the course. (It was pretty scary stuff mind you!) You wouldn't want that looking at you in your home now would you? ;) Well after Middle D...

It was a lovely sunny warm weekend again yay! Sunday afternoon we went for a walk at Coleton Fishacre. There's a gorgeous house and gardens there but one thing I didn't expect to see were lots of frogs! I used to like drawing frogs, I'm going to look into my posts from the past to dig out some to show you. Here they are. :) I didn't realise I did so many sketches of them! I should have taken my sketchbook with me shouldn't I? It's such a pretty place, even in March.  Not the usual March weather though was it? Blue skies, blossom on the magnolia trees, Who'd like to live in a house like this? Me! You could lose yourself in the gorgeous blue sea, so stunning. Thankyou so much for visiting! xx