My quest to explore new approaches to flower patterns is on! Indian textiles have been a passion of mine since I was in my teens in the 1970s, when Cockburn Street market in Edinburgh was full of all things Indian: wood carving, jewellery, Mysore soap, incense, embroidery and beautiful clothing. It opened my heart to an exotic new world. So, tracing this lovely image of a quilt to try and absorb some of the ingenuity was a natural place to begin ... As I was drawing, I was surprised by the close relationship to Jacobean embroidery and textiles from the 17th century in Britain. I found a paper on the subject online from London School of Economics and discovered, in a nutshell, that the Dutch and the English established trading posts in the east in 1606 to import spices, textiles and opium.
History was never my strong point at school, but that is really interesting - I imagine great galleons sailing the seven seas bearing in their timbers such glittering treasures as rubies, spices and rich embroidery. Those wonders from strange lands must have had an amazing effect on the people then, if Cockburn Street market in the 1970s could fire up my young mind so strongly! Incidentally, also in my teens, I fell in love with British folk music of the same era. I think I would have been more interested in history lessons at school if they had been focused on society and the arts rather than the dates of battles. Replacing the flower circled in white (pictured below) improved the dynamics of this pattern. The first version works well, but I feel the new version above is more lively. I am aware of the fact that I always tend to default to a full-frontal view of flowers - all you have to do is click the floral tab for evidence of this habit. My absolute firm favourites of the patterns I have designed so far contain the simple, full frontal approach (see blossoms here for example). I love the honest cheer it brings, but working on this pattern makes me feel I should try to investigate some different aspects of flowers and maybe mix things up a little more.
I spent some time this week on making some linen textures for the new Voynich/Jacobean inspired pattern. It's coming along pretty well, the two images below show progress following on from the work in last week's post. Because the pattern suggests Indian block-print patterns to my mind (and I adore Indian textiles) I went for a natural dye feel in the palettes.
Harking back to May 2022 and a few drawings I made inspired by the Voynich manuscript, this week I began another pattern I have always wanted to design but never plucked up the courage to get on with dealing with the complexities of turning a drawing into a pattern. I met many pitfalls along the way: I traced the original in Procreate, which was a good start, but by the time I got this far with it I realised I was working from tiny originals at 72 dpi. I forgot they were low resolution, and I prefer to work with 300 dpi as industry standard, or at least Procreate's default 264 dpi; so, resizing and redrawing was necessary. So, once I had sorted the resolution and nice crisp elements I was up and running. At the same time I tweaked the dimension of the pattern tile which not only tightened the design, but as an added bonus it also fitted the texture tiles I have been collecting. Here are three colour separations which on their own have a delightful floating and spacious quality which may well become another pattern.
Four fun colourways in the pattern I worked a couple of weeks ago to accompany the Moth Garden designs. These are the inky speckle textures I made last year - I think the cobalt one (flowers top right) needs a bit of work, it's just a little bit too speckled for these little flowers. I now have 2 Moth Garden designs, plus the clouds pattern as well as this in the collection. I'm looking forward to putting them all together to see how they look!
Lovely light-filled flowers to herald in the spring for Easter: I made this watercolour from 2019 into a half-drop pattern over the weekend.
I painted this watercolour especially with pattern-making in mind, but couldn't work out how to do it back then - I had still to develop the method I use today on my old iPad, but finally, here it is! Normally at Easter I would be outside in the garden with my watercolours in my popup tent, but this year the holiday fell too early and the weather left a bit to be desired. The spring flowers weren't quite out yet, and no sign of blossoms on the apple trees. I didn't get around to making jelly bunnies or a cake this year, either, because it just didn't feel seasonal. However, Molly arrived with a super spicy and fruity dough recipe for hot cross buns, so in the end we did have an Easter theme in the kitchen. Words cannot describe the fragrance as they were baking. Designing a simple companion pattern to use along with a more complex one is usually a very easy, quick process, such as last week's cloud patterns, but this one turned out to be a bit more challenging than I thought. The idea was simple enough, a striped pattern in 3 of the inky speckle colours used in the 'Rivermoth' patterns (here, and here) echoing motifs contained in them. However, in the process I accidentally mixed up two different pattern techniques at first, so nothing fitted in repeat. When I got that to work I adjusted the dimensions of the pattern tile to move the vertical elements closer together to tighten the design, and that started the whole process again from scratch: each layer had to be reset with alterations in my handmade-although-digital process. but, finally, a result!
I had intended making another two variations on the colourway but ran out of time due to the faffing which continued for hours. That will have to wait for next week now. Two fun, simple patterns to accompany the busier moth garden designs of 3 March. I picture a set of cushions on a sofa in my mind and imagine how they would all look together when I do this. I played with so many different colourways for the stars and clouds design above that I couldn't decide on a favourite, so I made a new pattern shown below just with clouds, but in all the inky speckle colours I made last October!
I am being shared between the upholstery section and the sewing cabin at work now, which means training in different equipment - today, it was the embroidery machine so I made a Binky!
I had so much fun drawing on the envelope and inside B's birthday card it made me think I should do more of this kind of drawing. I just sat and let it happen without too much thought, my mind simply spilling onto the paper. The invention was just like being a kid again, and B loved it. The card itself was one of the ones I made back in December, which I set aside for B at the time - there's always one in a batch which turns out a bit special.
I made monochrome versions of these designs last December as a quick aside, but only just got around to working on colour separations last month (and no, I still haven't found a better title than the mondegreen "Rivermoth Tonight"). Here they are now in beautiful speckly ink colours. Of course, I wanted to see how they would look applied to products. It has been an absolute age since I had a go on Redbubble and it was very nearly another age until I got logged in, thanks to forgetting my password and user name, and then had the wrong password written down for the email address to receive account recovery directions. But I sorted it out in the end, so I could try these two out on a couple of my favourites. It's marvellous really how the tech works to let you see how a pattern sits on an object, such a fun thing - and who knows, I may even buy something one day. For the time being I have my designs set to private until I decide what I want to share there, as I have a sneaking suspicion that ideas get pinched left right and centre from the platform.
A more spacious pattern using elements from Yay Flowers, based on the lower left image in last week's collage. I thought this would be an easy thing to do because the pattern setup was already in place, but moving things around, redrawing and balancing various parts naturally led to problem-solving, and took more time than I anticipated. It's an activity I really enjoy, though, and now this quiet, relaxed pattern might be nice for curtains and cushions, or even as an upholstery fabric for a lovely old chintzy sofa. I like the way some colours are stronger than others, suggesting dyes of differing fugitivity on a vintage material - a satisfyingly vintage cottage mood.
Daylight began its return this week with the sun's angle bouncing up 10 degrees higher than it was at the winter solstice, and a sudden marked increase in daylight both in the mornings and evenings. It is a joy to see, and to hear the birds waking up with tootling and whootling precursors to the dawn chorus. When the sun comes out, it really feels as though spring is just around the corner.
With this is mind, take a look at these screenshots of recent Yay Flowers work in progress: some pretty details come along while making colour separations, and these looked just like spring to me. I'll be taking a closer look at these, and maybe making some new patterns based on them soon. I finally got a linen texture to work with the new Yay Flowers half-drop pattern by resizing the Peru linen colourway tiles I made last September, making the 'weave' tighter to better suit complex designs like this. Above you see the outline version, which enables the background colour to be used within the pattern itself, providing a fresh and spacious appearance. Here I am using the vibrant colours based on a Peruvian hand-knitted cardigan I bought in London's Camden Lock, when I was living close-by in Belsize Park during the late 1980's and early '90's. (The cardigan is still going strong, in spite of its age!) I used the coloured textures in October for my fruits and blossoms design. Loving the faded chintz look on this version! Also using the resized Peru linen texture, the colours have been toned down slightly in this one for a softer, more antique look. This is the version without outline, using only a few of the stipple details on the main flowers.
See also this pattern I made in October using the original Peru linen texture. The permutations of a five or six colourway are apparently endless. Lots of fun and fails this week while experimenting with texture overlays and colourways. I discovered big textures didn't work with this pattern because there's already a lot going on in it, so I made a completely new autumn palette based on a favourite Crazy Daisies colourway with a more even, close speckle which looked fine. In the process I involved the original outline drawing, with the result I now have two versions: one using outline, and the other without, each with 5 colour separations.
The screenshots above show the progress of final checks on the outline version after I played around with the colours. When I make these checks I save a jpeg to iPad's camera roll, and open it in Procreate next to the original psd artwork. Using the drawing guide grid (seen above in white) I check one square at a time, blown up to fill the iPad screen, looking for any imperfections or mistakes which I then correct in the pattern artwork layers. I put a large pink dot in each square of the jpeg image once it has been checked, so I know where I am. I'm sure most of the corrections I make wouldn't even show in print, but the weird thing about printing is that it can either hide or emphasise even the teeny-weeniest halo or shadow - so it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to paying for proofs. During the process I noticed a couple of the speckle texture colour layers didn't tile as well as I thought, so amending those is next on the list. |
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Welcome to my illustration and patterns blog!
I illustrate under the pen-name of Binky McKee, McKee being my mother's maiden name. Binky was the name of every single cat my great-grandmother kept - allegedly about 40 of them during her 94 years of life. I changed the website address a few months ago, so some older links on previous posts are broken. If you click one of those and it takes you to a strange page, simply replace the .co.uk after the binkymckee. with weebly.com and it will work again. I hope you enjoy your visit! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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I keep lots of scrapbooks and sketchbooks where I develop ideas and design little creatures. Here's a peek inside one ...
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As you may know, I am also known as Heather Eliza Walker.
Click the image if you would like to find out more and visit my other website. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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May 2024
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This time, take a peek into my ceramic design sketchbook. I actually made some of the mugs, but I kind of prefer the drawings! The plate designs are painted on paper plates, a most liberating process.
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These watercolours are from my pattern sketchbook. I used coloured wax crayons to resist the washes of watercolour, also home-made rubber stamps dipped in bleach then printed on crêpe paper - the bleach takes out the paper dyes.
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A sketchbook I used for mark-making with unusual objects - corks, seed-heads, feathers, home-made rubber stamps, my fingers and lots of flicky things ...
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