Jessie Lilac Blog

I love a bit of sparkle don't you? I'm quite partial to a mermaid too so I decided to put the two together and make my mermaid of gold! I loved using the gold paint and seeing it shine when tilted to the light. She's painted on 10 x 7 canvas board and looks beautiful when caught in the light. Little golden fish swim with her and I've used touches of pale blue iridescent ink in the background too, creating a watery magical sea in which they swim. Her hair is a pure golden colour and swirls around in the water, decorated with tiny flowers. If you'd like to own this pretty mermaid of gold, please click here to see all the details. :) Thankyou for coming to visit today, I hope you're having a lovely week! xx

Hello there, after the very eventful and exciting week I wrote about in my last post, this week has been very quiet in comparison, I've been spending the time working on some new little paintings on canvas board and on paper. The three you see in the picture above were all worked on at the same time, while one was drying or if I'd reached a point where I wasn't sure what to do next, I'd move on to the next one. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook you might have thought they were flying off my art table like a conveyor system! The truth is that they each took several days to complete and they all finished within a couple of days of eachother. Here's the first one, it's called 'Noctambula.' It measures 7 x 5 inches and is painted with acrylic paint and collage paper on canvas board. Sometimes I like to incise into the wet acrylic paint to make fine lines. I actually use an old knitting needle for this! It's a very satisfying thing t...

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 ...

I took a break from acrylics yesterday and got out my watercolours and black ink to make these cards for sale. :) They all have birds in them except one! They're all listed in my Etsy shop , so hurry over there if you'd like to snap one (or two?) up! Thinking about it, I've been drawing and painting birds a lot this week.  In the picture above I've drawn with a black ink pen, over watercolour washes. I love how the page is really wet with the paint and then becomes a lovely surface to draw on once it's dry. This one above is acrylic painted in my sketchbook with a teeny amount of pen here and there. You know I said at the beginning of this post that I had a break from acrylics to paint the cards? Well here's what I was working on. It's mixed media on canvas board and I used one of my favourite paint colors! That pink is actually really bright pink, it's difficult to show how beautiful the colour is in the phot...

I could not believe my eyes earlier today when I saw that my likes on Facebook had jumped up to 900! As a thankyou I'm having a giveaway of one of my A4 prints. All you need to do is to be a liker of my Facebook page and to share the post I have there about the giveaway on your own Timeline.You can choose any print from these above, so please leave me a comment underneath that post too so I know which one you'd like to win! To see the prints in more detail, please  click here . I'll announce the winner on Monday, both here and on Facebook. I've been working on a new painting for Spring.  You might remember this sketch (below) I did a couple of weeks ago? Well I kept finding myself turning the page of my sketchbook back to it because I love the colours. I just knew I had to do a painting based on it. So here it is! It's called 'The Song of Tulips' and is painted with acrylic on 7 x 10 canvas board. It's now available to buy...

There was a time when my main art form was sculpture. I was doing an art degree and was told by a tutor that 'painting wasn't my strength' and to concentrate on 3D. The work above is made from a fur lined board with cast papier mache  baby heads, each one slightly different from the other. If you've only ever seen my recent 'whimsical' paintings this post might surprise you. I was at art college at the time, in my final year and as part of that course, I organised a workshop at Colston's Girls' School in Bristol. I'd just about forgotten all about it until Middle Daughter asked me what had happened to my pea pods. They must have had an effect on her at the time, poor little thing! At college I found myself making art that I didn't particularly like, I threw a lot of it on a skip at the end of the course. (It was pretty scary stuff mind you!) You wouldn't want that looking at you in your home now would you? ;) Well after Middle D...