Working in Procreate, I cut out shapes from scans of the textured papers I made last week, and began to play around making compositions. I paid attention to careful positioning and making space for the forms, avoiding visual clutter. I thought a lot about Richard Tuttle (fave artist!) while I was working; how his works appear very casual, a bit messy and thrown together, but in fact his pieces are slowly and meticulously composed. Taking a cue from that, I put thought into every movement while trying to keep my work fresh and spontaneous.

My process this week reminded me of a project we were given to do at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen in the early 1980s. We were to create a set of 6 or 7 forms which were simple enough to repeat. Next, we had to arrange them in as many different ways as we could think of, recutting the forms each time, and see how many works we could create with them in a day.

This was my absolute favourite thing to do at art school ever, I was on fire with it and didn’t want to stop! I made mine by cutting out cardboard shapes; I used hockey-stick shapes, crosses, rectangles and lozenges which I painted in different colours using fast-drying acrylic. I did all sorts of things, mostly making structures from cardboard such as shelves, pockets, boxes and frames for my arrangements. I hung my painted shapes on strings, pinned them to the wall, and chained them together with wire. I laid them down flat on the floor and made different compositions, taking frottage prints using an inked roller on thin paper of each. I just had a ball, and my space wasn't big enough for the creative tsunami which ensued; the majority of students got a lot out of this project, and the entire studio was awash with coloured shapes and creations which spilled out into the corridor.

That in the moment joy of playing mindfully is something more elusive in adulthood, we have to make time and space for it and escape our concerns, but when it happens it's wonderful. I hadn’t come across Richard Tuttle yet when I was at art school in Aberdeen. I don’t know if his work was widely known in Scotland in the early 1980s (the days before internet, kids - they did exist) but it seems to me that he is exceptionally gifted at playing mindfully and with great intelligence. This wonderful exercise set by my tutors back in the day could easily have been dreamed up by him.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

P.S. Here is a link to one of my favourite videos of Tuttle at work if you are interested, and to his fabulous 2007 exhibition at Sperone Westwater, Memory Comes from Dark Extension

I do like a week that starts with a new moon on Monday. It feels like a fresh start, rich in potential for new beginnings and adventures. This Monday was ... interesting. It started with an unintentional mashup of the Happy Days lettering idea I was working on last week. I opened the PSD document with layers in Preview by mistake and saved as a Jpeg, resulting in mangled transparent areas. It has a great 1950s vibe! I then went on to flood the kitchen at lunch time (left a tap running, plug in sink, nipped out to the bins, got distracted, 30 mins later = major flood). At least we had all clean drawers and cupboards, not to mention a spotless floor by the time we mopped up - that's a good new beginning.

On Tuesday I made a sunny composition of poppies and butterflies, thinking it would look good on tote bags. It didn't, but I discovered how to enable Kids' Clothing on Redbubble, which is great because I think a lot of my designs suit children's clothing better than adult.

During the remainder of the week I made a new colour palette and reworked the Happy Days lettering. I wanted something cleaner and brighter to really look happy, and here is the result! Hopefully things will settle down now we have passed the new moon, and tomorrow brings the first quarter. No more floods and mashups.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

I set to work on the garlands paintings at the beginning of the week, starting with designing compositions with gouache paintings of poppies and butterflies I made a couple of weeks ago. It was lovely work, and I was delighted with the resulting pattern pictured above; I was particularly interested in the woodblock effect of the garlands.

Next, I spent a couple of days designing lettering, with the aim of making cards and stickers -  it was enormous fun playing around with various layouts, and I really got into it! I am looking forward to getting them into my shop next week.

In the mean time, as always:

​Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Link to my shop here

Working with the gouache paintings I made last week, I made some butterflies to go with the poppies (top right) and created a new pattern. I am loving this work! Next week I intend to work on the poppies pictured top left. I am uploading them to my Redbubble account, it's always exciting to see them on the products and tweak around with them until they look just perfect.

A succession of hot, sunny days, watering the garden daily and witnessing the exuberance of peony roses, poppies, lily of the valley and all the other joy going on around me proved irresistible. I got out my pop-up tent and set up studio in the garden, the tent covered with a blanket for shade, and painted in the afternoons. These are 4 pages from my sketchbook, the same one as my Easter weekend work in April, when I made a change to my work method and wrote about how, at first, changing the approach to my work made me uncomfortable. I really didn't like it to start with, but now I am loving it.

I trained as a painter at art school in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Chelsea School of Art, London, where I took my MFA in painting. I was represented by a gallery in Covent Garden, and also showed my work regularly in London galleries and at times in Europe. After graduating I had to find work, and it just so happened I ended up in design and applied arts, so drawing became my main focus. It wasn't hard because I love drawing and used to work in my Dad's architectural business during my school holidays; at school we were taught to draw in the William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley tradition. I also enjoyed the purpose of design.

Drawing is, of course, the backbone of my Heather Eliza work. The duality in my work methods was what prompted me several years ago to make a clear division and illustrate under the name of Binky McKee, with license to be as decorative as I wanted. At first I didn't really understand what I was doing and there were, naturally, a few crossovers between my Heather Eliza drawings and Binky work; but over time the divide widened. My Easter weekend work experiment of not filling in a drawn outline has widened the divide further as my instincts as a painter come into play.

It is a strange fact that the work I was making digitally last year in Procreate first reawakened my old painterly instincts. I was thrilled by what I could do when I got the app on my iPad, and it is still invaluable to me. I don't use line at all when I work digitally, but build illustrations in exactly the same way as I used to paint. I am still working on a children's book in this way, often incorporating hand painted images. Now my painterly instincts are wide awake once more - I might even make a whole painting on paper one day, rather than just design elements!

Thanks for dropping by, see you next week! 
If you would like to see my drawings you are welcome to visit my website at Heather Eliza Walker.