Jessie Lilac Blog

I went to life drawing this morning and they had my favourite model there, yay! She's got such a lovely face for drawing so the morning passed by very quickly. I don't know whether it's showing here on my blog but I feel quite differently about my painting recently, feeling the need to play more and not worry about the outcome so much. I was worrying so much it was preventing me from actually doing anything which defeats the whole object really doesn't it? This is a page from my sketchbook with words copied from something that I read. I find doing this helps me to move forward. What inspires you ?

I liked the suggestion by Owen that the bird in my last post could be the Bluebird of Happiness. What a lovely idea! I liked the idea so much I've made another painting with that as the theme. One question, what do you call a picture that doesn't use any paint, just coloured pencils? Is that then a drawing? When I think of a drawing I don't imagine there to be areas of colour. What would you call it? This picture has watercolour as well as coloured pencil so I think it can safely called a painting. Or can it? If it was rendered in pencil crayons alone, what then would it be?

There was a time when I thought it wrong to draw a picture of a house on a hill, let alone one quite as unrealistic as this. Maybe years of art college taught me it would be too simple, too childlike? I say BRING IT ON!!

I'm going through changes with my artwork at the moment, I adore watercolours and I'm enjoying adding the pen and ink afterwards and I'm currently playing in my sketchbook without a purpose because it's the only way I can move forwards. Of course this headache doesn't help matters!

I've still got a good supply of acrylic paints that I used to paint with on large canvases, so when my daughter wanted her new purse painted red I knew just what I was going to use! I had some left over, so not wanting it to go to waste, I covered a page of my sketchbook with it. Some added lines of white and black ink and here we have my picture for this week's Illustration Friday :)

How could I resist doing this week's Illustration Friday ? What a lovely word to illustrate.

Here's my illustration for an article in Britchop magazine about different sorts of bikes and how some of them sound like...want to guess? Meanwhile I'm waiting for the paint to dry on my IF for this week. It's half term so not a lot of time to do it. Once the paint is dry I can finish it off with my trusty black ink.!

My eldest daughter's just moved to London. Here she is with her husband outside their new home. She looked after us really well, cooking breakfast in the morning! We had a lovely time. When I was young I used to look out for celebrities on my rare visits to London, never saw anyone, so when we went to visit them last week I didn't bargain on seeing Rob Brydon and Simon Cowell while we were out and about. (Not together of course!) Simon Cowell had his new girl on his arm. Here's one of my drawings from friday's life drawing. The other drawings I did were a bit of a disaster because I wanted to concentrate on his face but the model was chewing gum in a very exaggerated way so they're best kept where they are in the sketchbook! And last of all, let me wish you lots of love on Valentine's Day whoever you're with and whatever youre doing! Have a lovely weekend :)

These paintings evolved while I was working on the Illustration friday 'Muddy' one. (See post below.) When I say evolved, I mean it! Each one started out as a drawing of a girl who was putting on a face pack but other events took over! What do YOU like to do in the bathroom?

Here's my illustration for this week's Illustration Friday I've had so much fun doing this one, I've painted a couple of other pictures similar to this and will finish them really soon. I'll show them here very soon!

This picture above started out as a doodle in my sketchbook, the page was covered with little dabs of paint where I was trying out the colours. Thanks to the magic wand in photoshop, hey presto they're gone! now all I have to do is remember what on earth I did for next time! I painted the girl without any black pen lines, it gives a different feel to it doesn't it? Life drawing this morning and I wanted to get the model's face right, so had another go above the original drawing. I mananged to get her ear and hair done in more detail but the one below actually looks more like her! Oh! An email just popped up from Illustration Friday so I'll be off now to see what we have in store this week!

Some more sketchbook pages. I'm currently working on new illustrations for the Britchop magazine, so you can imagine these doodlings are nothing to do with it! But if I tell you that I've been drawing a wasp then perhaps these aren't so far fetched!

I've kept a sketchbook since about 1994 and find it useful to put in quotes that help to inspire and motivate me. It's interesting for me to go back to older sketchbooks and find snippets that I'd written that still ring true today. I'm sure I repeat the same kind of advice over and over but it sometimes takes that long for it to sink in. Here's today's page.

It's great how a visit to a different town can inspire new work isn't it? Here's a picture showing you how focused I am now!

The blue monster faces above glare down at the Christchurch College diners. I love the style of writing on the tree tub, it looks like 'Arts and Crafts'. I didn't check if it was made in that era but I did read the motto, it said "The leaves of the trees are the healers of the nations" We visited Christchurch college as you can see above, very packed with tourists but I managed to take these pictures giving the impression of it being empty! Trinity college was smaller but empty of tourists. With the most beautiful chapel (above). The diners here were accompanied by these ferocious creatures. A ten minute walk from the town centre, ice on gravel, a sunny but cold day.... Now I feel inspired to draw and paint!