Jessie Lilac Blog

I've been thinking about why I'm drawing cottages lately.  Maybe it's because there aren't many people around where we live and on our daily walks we rarely come across anyone else which I suppose is a good thing as we're still in Lockdown and have to practice Social Distancing which has now become a very well used phrase in our language! Maybe it's this lack of seeing people around that my mind is turning towards houses and flowers? The ones above are done in ink. I love the pearlescent inks, they're so beautiful when they catch the light. The paintings above and below are painted in acrylic. I've been obsessed with watercolour for a few weeks but I felt I'd like to get some acrylics out again. I've always been like this, going through phases of being obsessed with a particular medium thinking yes this is it! This is my final medium and then finding myself being drawn to changing once again to a different way of wor...

I'm not going to talk about the weirdness that's happened to the world because we all know about that already but one thing I noticed since lockdown is that my artwork has changed from drawing girls to drawing houses. I'm going to share my latest ones here.  They're all done in watercolour and with these first ones I used black pen too.  They're mainly based on cottages I've seen on visits to Cornwall and Dorset with the addition of my own imaginary flowers and colours. I'm not sure which style I prefer, the very traditional looking paintings or the more abstracty ones without any pen lines. I'm enjoying painting both styles and that's the most important thing. I hope you're staying safe and well.

As you might have seen from my last post, I've been making paintings in my sketchbook and so I thought I'd share my method with you of my latest one. I've also decided to make it into a new design for the items in my Rebubble shop , which I'll share with you at the end of this post. So here's how I made my latest sketchbook painting..    First I painted in some random coloured areas of watercolour with a vague house shape in the middle and allowed it to dry.  I drew the windows to the house with a white Posca pen size 1M and painted them with some more watercolour, yellow ochre which is the same colour that I used for the house. I added detail to each of the areas of watercolours using a Posca colour that would look nice against each one. You can see on the blue and green areas that I used a darker colour in the same shade. When in doubt, I find that white always works well against a dark background. I continued to add details treating ea...