Jessie Lilac Blog

I've noticed that there's been a theme of head and shoulders happening in my artwork lately.   I had some little wooden egg cups that I painted with colourful ladies. I loved adding the gold paint and glitter to them! They make lovely little trinket bowls!  I sold both of them within a day and I'm so very happy that they've found their new homes. When I'm painting, I often go from one painting to another to let each of the stages dry. During the painting of the egg cups, I drew a page of ladies with black hair and an art journal page using a swatch of curtain fabric for a background. The egg cup ladies are still having an influence with this one too I think! I'll leave you with this beautiful textured tree trunk. Have a I mentioned I love trees?  See you again soon! xx

 Having talked about all the mediums I love to use in my last post, I have to say that I often come back to watercolour even though I find it the most difficult because it has its own mind and if you have any experience of it yourself you'll know that it quite often does what it pleases! This painting is a combo of watercolour and coloured pencil and I used it as a Mothers Day card to give to my mum this year. I'm thinking about getting it printed to sell in my shop but I haven't made up my mind about that yet.  At the weekend, we often go somewhere a bit different and last Sunday we visited Buckfast Abbey. It's always so calm and peaceful there. I'm not Catholic or even a church goer but I love the spiritual atmosphere and the beautifully kept abbey and gardens.    The Millenium Show garden has a beautiful wall made from cut logs. Isn't it lovely? I'd love a wall like that in my garden. My own gardening efforts are a bit hit an...

Over the years I've tried out all kinds of mediums and I don't think I've ever settled on just one or two absolute favourites but I have a feeling people who have seen my sketchbook pages over the past year might think differently? Anyway, the top picture you see here is an acrylic background with a stamped pattern and the drawing done in Posca pens. Here below are a few of my most recent paintings that I do on a daily basis in my little A5 Moleskine sketchbook. Let's see what my current fave mediums are. This one has a background of FW inks with Posca pens on top. The white flowers and the bird were done with a Liquitex paint marker.  You can't see the lovely shininess from the photo, but these are my Spectrum Noir brushpens. They are lovely and glittery. I also used some cobalt blue watercolour because I don't have many of the Sparkle pens and I felt the picture needed an extra colour. Here's another Sparkle pen painting, the onl...

This painting was a long time in the making. Not so much the painting of it but the journey it had over a long period of time before it became my colourful little painting of Frida. Many years ago we had a shop at St Nicholas Market in Bristol. We sold all sorts of handmade objects and one of the things we had for sale were little carved notice boards that held a little notepad.  I liked them a lot so I took one home and for many years I used it for the family shopping list. If you look at the shape of my Frida painting, you'll see the original shape of one of these boards. A few years ago we moved house to Devon and I saw how battered my little shopping list board had become but I still loved the shape of it so I held on to it with the plan of filling all the broken parts and repainting it one day. So one day I decided to prepare the board with filler and gesso and I began the portrait. You might know that my painting style these days is usually very simple a...