In my fourth interview in this series, I had a lively chat with Françoise Blayac (and at one point, one of her sweet kids). She’s an artist, teacher, and content creator, as well as a stay-at-home mother of 4 in southern France.

Shelley Skail: Hello! Thank you for making the time to chat with me today.

I was thinking about how you paint literally everything. That’s one of the things that is really remarkable about your work – there’s no subject you’re scared to tackle; landscapes, animals, architecture, people – you seem cool with painting all of it which is pretty awesome. With such a diverse range, where do you get your ideas from when deciding what to paint?

Françoise Blayac:  Books! I like to read a lot of fiction and historical fiction. It’s the same with TV and period dramas, and even some movies. The colours and the atmosphere just put me in the mood for painting. I like the colours in period dramas – they’re not super flashy: muted colours, warm tones or dark and mysterious. They get me excited for painting.

I’m also inspired by the seasons and a bit by nature too.

I’m thinking about your artwork and there is that sort of vintage feeling to them. They feel like they’re from an older period of time and there’s something romantic about them.

I was hoping that would show through! I sometimes feel like I’m a little bit scattered in some of the things that I do. But I was wondering if it [the period inspiration] actually shows in my work.

I think it does and I think there’s a thread that runs through all your art. You’ve got really good contrast and with that contrast and the sophisticated colour palette you use there a sense of that romantic notion of the past as opposed to bright colour schemes that might be associated with futurism or any other time period.

Yes! One of my things is to carve something out of a blank sheet of paper – I really like to add the shadows and then the highlights to make it pop. So that’s totally my thing! I’m glad you’re pointing that out because at least that means that it looks like what I think it looks like. [both laughing]

Definitely! 

I don’t want to derail you from your questions – but what you said about the contrast – that ties in with a rebranding I’m doing.

Ooh! Tell me, tell me!

So I wanted to do something that’s not about me, but where I’m really helping people. 

One thing that I realized is when I started watercolours I was already doing pencil work and already into realism. I hadn’t been drawing like that for a long time but I was doing okay with it. And when I got into watercolours, I started with the easier stuff – loose florals and all that kind of thing.

Right away I was struck by the rules. For instance, one thing that you hear a lot is that there should be no white paint. That in watercolour it’s the white of the paper. I’ve heard that, I’ve seen it in a book that I have and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t like it’s, it’s just too flashy, not natural enough. No, I don’t want to do it that way’. And I felt frustrated every time when I was learning from loose florals and similar tutorials. I was frustrated because I felt like something was missing.

I wanted to add more like I did with other mediums; it just felt unfinished. It was frustrating me for a long time and I felt like I just I don’t fit in the watercolour world because what I make is too realistic and watercolour is supposed to let the watercolours do their thing and supposed to let it flow. And you’re not supposed to want to control it and blah, blah, blah. 

And nobody ever told me. ‘you’re too realistic’, nobody ever said anything like that but I always felt I was doing it wrong. I really fought with it for two years.

It sounds very dramatic, but it really blocked me because I see that loose stuff is very popular. And so I always felt like, Well, I think that I’m doing great work. I like it. It’s beautiful and I’m having fun doing it, but maybe I’m the only one to like it, you know? 

I kind of felt bad about it but then I noticed that older people were more receptive to what I was doing. And I realized that actually, there are people who want to paint realistically, who either don’t know how or they do, but, they need help. And some of them, actually a lot of them, feel the same way that I do.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that way, but I’ve noticed – from asking – that they are a lot of people who actually feel like they’re not doing it the right way because you hear that you have to do this and that, but we’re interested in details. We want to make it realistic. And we sometimes wonder if watercolour is for us or not. 

So since this really made me – I’m going to say – suffer. Then I’m thinking I got to do something, to put realistic watercolour forward a little more maybe and create momentum around that because why not? 

I really want to help people beautify their realistic watercolours even more, and just have fun with it.

Oh, that’s lovely. And there’s something really special about realizing that you have a tribe. That there are people like you, that like the things that you like. That you can connect with them in a meaningful way and offer them something.

Yeah! You know, if I was just selling my art, then it would be different. But since I’m teaching, I feel like it has more meaning to teach something that I’ve experienced that really bugged me, that I really understand and I’m learning to accept and enjoy.

I think it has more meaning for me to do it that way than to just teach a tutorial. 

Yes! It’s exciting. So I guess that’s your current project or labour of love that you’re working on, right?

It is, yes! I created a website around that and I actually changed the name also. I decided it wasn’t going to be my name anymore and that I wanted to start over. There was one part of the journey that was more about finding my style and practising and all this [gestures] – it was more about developing my portfolio and about “me stuff”, and now it’s another stage. I feel like now’s the time for it to be meaningful, at least for me and for some people.

So for the ‘Blayac Fine Art’ thing, I will probably keep my account but I want to do something different. So I made a website that’s called Painting and Chocolate, and I know you’re going to be like, ‘why chocolate?’

It has to do with comfort, and a full life. I have personal stories around that, and I think people remember it very well too.

Painting and chocolate?  That sounds like my happy place too actually! 

I know! But you know what? One of the stories behind that is that last year, starting in Autumn – which is going to start up again because it’s starting to get cool again – but every time I came back from school in the morning and I went to work (well I had my younger one with me), I would make myself a hot chocolate and it’s part of the whole vibe – with the TV shows and the books and the hot chocolate just completes the whole feeling. 

And that’s why the chocolate part of it has more to do with how I want my artwork to feel, rather than it just being the realism thing. This is my vibe that I put into it. And then I thought that it was easy to remember and nobody else had it. It’s important here locally in France – I wanted people to actually understand and not have to try to pronounce something that’s very weird. 

I love it! I really like it!  I was just thinking. There’s this fantasy watercolour artist called Amelia Leonards, who paints realistically, as in she paints people, but they’re fantasy goddesses. And she often talks about eating chocolate chips while she’s painting, and about how her painting is fueled by chocolate chunks.  And I thought, ‘Yeah, so is mine sometimes, that or hot chocolate.’ And you and I have talked about hot chocolate before. I wonder if there’s a thread of chocolate and painting … I think you’re onto something smart.

I feel like eating is comforting because you want to create for yourself a world that you can get into and not think about all the things are happening outside, and the chocolate also helps that.

Definitely! 

Okay. I’m going to swing this back around because I mentioned Amelia Leonards there, who’s one of my favourite artists. I’m curious to know some of your favourite artists, living or dead.

I like a lot of things but I don’t have anyone that I’m awe of.  I’ve never been a fan, really, you know, like some people are with singers – where when they were teenagers they had posters. But there are artists I really like although it changes depending on what I do.

There’s a French artist called Jennifer Lefèvre / Jenny illustrations. She paints loose florals, and what I love about her is that although we have a lot of loose florals in France, she has that autumn vibe in it that’s really cool. She paints them in a way that nobody else does. They are still loose florals, but they are just fantastic. 

She has a lot of success with that because she’s so different and I really admire the fact that she’s able to paint a topic that a lot of people do in watercolour, but in such a different way. I just love that! 

And then recently I started oil painting because I’m going to give classes in my local community and although I’ll be teaching watercolour classes, I might have people from the other classes which are taught in the community come to my class and I need to be able to help them. I have never tried oil painting before, so I had to learn it.  I took a class on Skillshare by Sarah McKendry. She paints beautiful oil paintings, landscapes, the type with pine trees and fog and it’s just beautiful! I loved her class and I like her. So she’s one of the many oil painters that I admire.

And then another artist who works with gouache this time: Ruth Wilshaw. She has this amazing fantasy vibe in her gouache works. 

This is one of the many reasons I ask this question because I like to discover new artists as well. So thank you for introducing me to these artists. Do you have a favourite piece of your own art?

Yes, but it’s a similar thing. I don’t have an absolute favourite, but I do have a few, including a few art pieces I did for a challenge two years ago. That was with some girls from the Art Philosophy team [an art supplies company that Françoise is an ambassador for] and the theme was Disney.

That was the time where I learned to be more creative with my realism. For example, I made that Aladdin lamp painting. I took a photo of a desert in the daytime and changed it to make it nighttime so I had to change the colours and everything. And I inserted the lamp – I didn’t really copy the lamp from another place, I changed the perspective and a few other things and then I added stuff and it made it a very original painting.  

That’s also something that was realism – and I’ll talk about this more when I start putting content out there – but you can do a lot of things!  It’s not boring at all. And that was the start of something that I didn’t really pursue for a while because of all those doubts that I had that slowed me down. But I know I can do really cool imaginative stuff while being realistic. That’s what I like about it. 

I made several on that theme, including one on the topic of Brave (the Brave Disney movie): 

And then another one. I took a great wave photo. I kind of added my vibes to it, and I added that trident to give it The Little Mermaid look: 

And I made a Robin Hood one too: 

And after that, I kept going back and forth between what I thought I should be doing and what I really wanted to do. It took me two years to actually think, ‘okay, it’s correct. I’ll just do what I want to do because I’m tired of it now. It’s not going to be like this for a decade so I need to make up my mind. I know I cannot do something that I don’t feel like doing just for it to be pleasing to the masses.’ 

And it comes from that collaboration between realism and imagination. Have you heard the phrase “imaginative realism”? It’s a phrase I heard for myself, actually, because I like to paint things that look like things, but I also like there to be fantastical elements to it.

Oh, yes [at this point we are loudly interrupted by a very cute small person]

Seeing your kids just reminded me… Tell me about a day in your life.

Well, I usually tend to get up early, so I have time to do things at breakfast, you know, without the kids and get ready. And if I get up early enough, I’ll work a little bit on something. Then I get them up usually around 7.30 am, and we leave at 8.15 am to go to school.

I wanted to have a life that’s balanced, simple, and healthy, like in painting and chocolate. So we walk to school now. We’ve been doing this for a whole year – I walk them to school every day in the morning and home again in the evenings. It gives me a break from sitting all the time and I don’t feel guilty that I don’t exercise outside of that. So we walk except when it rains a lot (which is rare).

That takes about an hour there and back so I’m back here by 9:00. Usually I go shopping in the local shops – I get vegetables and stuff like that, which I didn’t use to do when I drove the kids to school. I used to go to the big grocery stores in the car. Now I do it like like the older people, and I like that. 

Then I would have my hot chocolate or herbal tea. Now the routine is changing a little bit because my little one is not here anymore, she’s in nursery. In the past I would do something on the computer in the morning and paint or film stuff in the afternoon while it was quiet when she was napping. Now, I can do it whenever I want to.

But I’ll work during the day from 9 am to 4.30 pm, then I go back to school to collect the kids and then take care of them until 8.30 pm or so when they go to bed.  After that I’m tired and I usually read or watch something. I used to work in the evening but I’m trying to take real rest now so I try not to do that.

What I am implementing is hard because I like to do all these things and I want to do more. But it hasn’t worked very well for me to do that. So I’m trying to rest a bit more.

It’s quite a full-on day, but it sounds like you’ve got quite a nice balance of different things.

Yeah, it takes a long time. In the beginning, it was terrible, I just worked all the time. And now I’m trying to be better about it. I use Instagram, but right now I don’t post much and I don’t really care that much, which I think is good. And I’m even thinking that I might prioritise YouTube more because I have a YouTube channel but I haven’t been posting there due to a lack of time although I actually prefer it. So I don’t know how I’m going to do it going forward but maybe less Instagram and more consistent posting on YouTube, really focusing on what I like best, and what frustrates me the least. Because it gets into your head and I want to feel good about what I’m doing and feel like I’m actually getting somewhere. 

Like you, I’ve deprioritized Instagram because I don’t feel like it adds a lot of value to my life. I mean in some ways it’s nice because I keep up with you, Vicky, Elise and other people.  But I think it’s like an endlessly hungry machine and I would prefer to write a blog post or paint or something else.

Yeah, I know. It’s complicated because you feel like you kind of have to be there. I’ve tried to play the game with Reels, but then at some point I was just getting nauseous every time I saw these fast movements. Every time I opened the app, seeing paintbrushes being flung in the air and all these things to attract attention. Everybody’s trying to do crazy stuff, and I think ‘is this really the way to do it?’

It really got me thinking. And even though I’m worried about missing out on visibility, I think YouTube is better because you don’t get punished for not being very consistent. And when you make something good, at some point people notice, and it keeps getting discovered. But on Instagram you could do the best thing possible but depending on who posts it, it could perform very badly, or if someone else posts it, it will perform very well just because it’s posted by so-and-so. I don’t like it.

Agreed! 

Moving on, can you finish this sentence, “If you really knew me, you know… “

If you really knew me then you’d know that even though I try to have a healthy life and I eat the 90% dark chocolate, I cannot resist a big pack of M&Ms.

Oooh, yes!  The peanut ones are my downfall! So the last thing I want to ask is, do you have a favourite joke?

So it’s not a joke but it is something funny that we do at home. We started doing this with my oldest one when he was little and he wasn’t looking, because kids are always like that when they eat. We would snatch his food away and replace it with other things. Well this evolved, so once my son and I did it to Frank, my kid’s dad.

But what happened is that we took his pizza when he wasn’t looking and we hid it. But it fell on the floor, and the dog was right there and he swallowed it!

So it was there one minute and the next second it wasn’t there anymore and the dog had it! [laughs] 

[laughing] Oh, that’s so funny!

And we were laughing but we were actually wondering if he was going to be mad, but he laughed too.  So that’s something silly that we do to the kids because they always look behind them when they’re eating. 

Amazing, I love it!   

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You can see more of Françoise‘s art on her Instagram, or have a look at her YouTube channel for art tutorials, or her Skillshare page for her full art classes, and check out her new website as she launches her world of realistic watercolour painting and chocolate

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If you enjoyed this interview with Françoise Blayac, you might enjoy my other interviews with

• Elise Aabakken
• Vicky Jeffery
• Simone Michiels
• Taylor Carroll
• Jen Dixon