During her teenage years Blackadder began meticulously collecting local flowers, compiling the specimens by pressing and labelling them with their full Latin names, a fascination that was to surface much later in her paintings of plants and flowers. She spent a substantial part of her childhood alone, due in part to a keen appetite for reading. Blackadder's father died when she was 10. Violet Blackadder ensured Elizabeth benefited from a series of promising educational opportunities and, determined to spare her daughter the struggles she had been through, convinced her own father to support Elizabeth's training as a domestic science teacher. Early years īlackadder was born and raised at 7 Weir Street, Falkirk, the third child of Thomas and Violet Isabella Blackadder. In 2012, Blackadder was chosen to paint Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's official Christmas card. Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps. She also painted portraits and landscapes but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers with extreme detail. In her still life paintings and drawings, she considered space between objects carefully. Blackadder worked in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing, and printmaking.

In 1962 she began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986. She was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. Dame Elizabeth Violet Blackadder, Mrs Houston, DBE, RA, RSA, HonRWA, (24 September 1931 – 23 August 2021) was a Scottish painter and printmaker.

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