Jessie Lilac Blog

Hello! I've had a lovely couple of days in Cornwall but before I tell you about that, let me show you what I've been doing. In between 'proper' work assignments I'm still doing my daily sketches. This one's made with Prismacolor pencils, they're my new favourites. My old favourites were a cheap set of WHS coloured pencils which I thought were amazing but they really don't get much of a look in these days now I've discovered the Prismacolors! They're so lovely and waxy and even on this thin paged sketchbook you can get lovely rich colours. I've made a little video of me in action. Would you like to see? The day before we left for Cornwall I made a very springlike drawing (above). At the time of drawing this the weather was quite the opposite, much wind and rain and so dark I could hardly see what I was doing. There was much talk on the news about Storm Imogen so I might have guessed our stay at the Cornish Coast would be a li...

This top picture I started by drawing a circle within a circle. I found that having a particular shape to fill was easier than filling a rectangle which is the usual shape for a picture isn't it? Would you like to see some more pages from my sketchbook that were done in the past few days? Here's a 2 page spread where I used just black pen and experimented with different shapes and patterns. The painting on the lefthand page was copied from a book about Beatrix Potter that I'm reading at the moment, from one of the illustrations of her watercolour studies. Since she was very young she did many studies from nature, the book has loads of lovely illustrations of her early work as well as the more well known paintings. I should blog about it one of these days but for those of you who can't wait that long ;) it's called Beatrix Potter, 188-1943, The Artist and her World. Published for the National Trust by F.Warne & Co. Here are some close ...