Jessie Lilac Blog

'Show Your Soul',  watercolour and acrylic ink on paper. One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. ( Clarissa Pinkola Estes ) It was a stormy morning when I painted this picture today. I tried to get a feeling of calm and centredness (is that a word?!) The colours are cool blues and greens and maybe more reminiscent of a summer's day than a November one but I felt drawn to using soothing greens on this blustery day. This painting is approximately 6 x 8ins, and will be available to buy in my Etsy shop. Please click here to see more details. You can't have my vases though! ;)

Can you spot the owl? This is the scene of my youngest daughter's bedroom this morning. She having 5 friends over tonight for a sleepover. I am so brave. Meanwhile I've been having fun making new owl ACEOS. You've already seen the middle one but let me introduce you to the others. pretty owl Two owls I've just listed them in my Etsy shop and I've painted them on strong acid-free watercolour paper with acrylic inks. They're $10 each (approx. £6.43 each.) Click on each of the titles to take you to their details. Thankyou for looking! I hope there's an owl that you like and if cats are more your thing then you'll like my next batch. It's going to be more cats soon! :)

sketchbook page Well what do you know, I'm painting owls today.  I love owls. They're so very different to other birds with their enormous head and round body. There's something engaging about the way they look at you too isn't there? I haven't heard one hooting for a while but it's a night time sound I would love to hear again one day. I thought it about time I did a little 'portrait' of one of my favourite birds and chose to make an ACEO on watercolour paper. He's quite pretty but he's definitely a boy. He's painted on strong watercolour paper with inks and watercolour and I've just put him in my shop.  If you take a fancy to him I'm sure he'd be happy to fly to your home! Please click here for more details. :) ~~~~

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.

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...

I wanted to see some golden yellow so I got out my acrylic inks. Have a lovely weekend one and all. :)

The word for Illustration Friday this week is bicycle. While I'm here, let me show you yesterday's drawing too. This one as you can see, doesn't have a bike in it. It has an owl. :) update... I changed the colours a little bit in this one. I think I might have had too many colours going on before, don't you? 

Haven't we had amazing weather these easter Holidays? I've been out and about nearly every day and spent lazy warm days sat in the garden with my sketchbook. This isn't my garden by the way, it's at Barrington Court in Somerset. Orchards look so pretty this time of year don't they? Look at this tree! There's not a lot of it left but it still struggles on despite all odds! Twisty branches in the cow shed. And a lovely big beautiful tree spreading and reaching up to the sky. Some welcome splashy water on this hot day. Is it me or does this statue look as though he's flamenco dancing? Home again. 

'Bottled' is the word this week for Illustration Friday and as it can have different meanings, I had a few choices of interpretions. I thought about a message in a bottle and bottled feelings. I even thought of it as the verb 'bottled' in the sense where someone loses their nerve. As the opposite has been true of me lately, I decided to follow my heart and to draw whatever came out on the page! :) I'm liking this black and white medium. No colour choices but sometimes having no choice takes us somewhere we weren't expecting doesn't it?

Its still not snowing but it's quite dark here today. I played with some colour to lighten my day. I had a dream last night. I didn't want this one to come true. But it did.

Spiders and leaves, singing pixies and flowers, a tall owl and girl, um......and some hens... It was my eldest daughter's hen weekend and I joined them for the saturday evening meal. It had a french theme, hence the stripey tops worn by a few. They were wearing berets too but I think by then they'd come off! They made Naomi wear a white top hat and feather boa and the room was amazing with candles and feathers galore. The partying went on until today (which is monday!) They had a fantastic time and it was difficult to keep it a secret from her until the day!

After thinking to myself I spend more than enough time online, I go and join Twitter! No, I don't make sense to myself but the lure of it was too much for me. Hey ho, see you there? I've had a difficult day feeling a bit cabin fevered, painting, drawing but missing the outdoors. I started a page of a brand new sketchbook too. I'd been looking forward to this moment as I drew closer to the end of the old one. I love a fresh start and all that. But. The pages won't take watercolour very well. I don't mind the buckling but the washes leave a mottled finish and bleed as they dry so I'm very disappointed with it. The picture above is the first page from it where you can see the mottling on the dress and neck. It looks better on the screen than it does in real life. I'm just going to have to buy a new one, oh the sacrifice! Here's to a sunny, happy weekend!x

Craving the wetness of watercolour again, I made these drippy puddley trees, then decided they needed something sitting on the branches. Owls had the first turn, then came the cats. These are mainly watercolour with tiny hints of a dark brown ink line here and there. I'm not sure where I'm going with these, but sometimes you just need to follow your nose. As they say.