Jessie Lilac Blog

Thankyou so much for your amazing reponse to my last post! It's so lovely to share my passion for colour with others that understand what I'm gushing about! You'd have thought that after that I'd be all fired up and filled with inspiration, getting my paints out and splashing the colour around but instead of this I've found myself stuck. Advice from the past tells me to 'fill the well' and 'go on a creative date'. Is this familiar to anyone? Julia Cameron's book The Artists Way is one I've read so many times I think I know it off by heart. I love it and it's filled with advice about staying creative but I did 'fill the well' and it doesn't seem to have worked. I've been out on lots of walks in nature, visited an aMAZing exhibition that I wrote about in my last post but now that I'm back to the usual routine I'm finding that I don't know which way to turn. I've tried to paint but it doesn't come...

If you are like me and you love colour, then you'll understand how excited I was to visit the Kaffe Fassett exhibition at the American Museum in Bath! It was a dull grey rainy day but look what greeting us on arrival!  multi-coloured yarn bombing! Outside the exhibition hall, the tree swayed in the wind with its fruit of rainbow pompoms and lightshades!  Never mind the wind and the rain, look what's up ahead!  I was so excited when I stepped inside, I didn't know what to look at first and when I heard that photography was allowed, that did it! So what to show you first? Well this red shelf display was the first thing you see as you walk through the entrance and I found it so overwhelming I couldn't look at it for very long, so I decided to find a calmer place in the exhibition. (I'll come back and show you this properly later when I've calmed down a bit.)  So into the green room, or cabbage room. There we...

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? -:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-·-:¦:-

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 ...