Since we passed the autumn equinox, my 100 days of cats project has taken on a positively festive feel! It wasn’t a conscious decision, just that a cold snap turned my thoughts to winter woollies and hats and scarves and then on to parties and pantomime. Above are the resulting adventures of Dick Whittington’s cat (46), a surprise party (48), butter wouldn’t melt (45) and (47) naughty Pussycat from the nursery rhyme:

Pussycat, pussycat where have you been?
I’ve been to London to visit the queen.
​Pussycat, pussycat what did you there?
I frightened a small mouse under her chair.

An unexpected and interesting thing has come out of the 100 days project on Instagram: new followers are seeing the account as being about the antics of a cat named Binky McKee, as opposed to illustrations of cats by an artist named Binky McKee. I’m fine with that! I was determined to keep an open mind when I began the project, and I am happy to go along with it. I like the idea of creating a character who can tell stories on my behalf which I can post while working on other projects which can’t be shared until complete. I will most likely do Folktale Week with Binky. I had intended the 100 days project to be finished in early November, then move straight into Folktale Week, but events since the beginning of September forced a go-slow which means I will definitely still be on it during Folktale Week.

Folktale Week will be running on Instagram November 4 - 10. Fancy joining in? Search #folktaleweek to find the talented developers who initiated it last year, and look out for the prompts!

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Booklet No.3 is underway in the 100 Days Project! The cover shows cat no. 41. I am nearly half way through my 100 cats now. I am delighted with how much I have learnt already, and how I have managed to come a long way towards developing my cat drawings. This is was exactly what I had hoped to achieve, but didn't know what to expect.

Jerry Saltz, in his wonderful article How To Be An Artist, extols the virtue of doing something a minimum of 100 times.
Step Two, Experience:
"10. Find your own voice, then exaggerate it. If someone says your work looks like someone else's and you should stop doing it, I say don't stop doing it. Do it Again. Do it 100 times or 1,000 times ... if it still looks like the other person's, try a different path."
And again:
"13. Scavenge. Life is your syllabus: gather from everywhere ... you can do this by looking for overlooked periods of art history, disliked and discredited styles, and forgotten ideas, images and objects. Then work them into your own art 100 or 1,000 times."

It's true, doing something 100 times really does have an amazing effect.
There are 33 rules and a number of exercises in this article. I copied them all into a notebook and I find useful wisdom in every single one of them.

<<<Newsflash!>>> Apparently, Jerry Saltz's article is going to become a book! I just found this on Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York magazine. Apparently there are now 70 rules!

Now, there is a date for the calendar! It's very exciting.
Speaking of dates, there will be no Weekly next Sunday as I will be out for the whole weekend, so - 
Thanks for visiting, see you in a fortnight!  - when I will probably have a few more cats to show you.
And just a quick PS: I used to do other pupils' punishment exercises of 100 lines for them at school. I loved writing the same sentence over and over again, trying to imitate their handwriting. It paid well and worked wonders for my forgery techniques!

The Three Little Kittens from the Mother Goose Collection (poem usually attributed to early 19th century American poet Eliza Lee Cabot Follen).
I so much enjoyed working on these as part of my 100 days of cats project. I wouldn't have thought of it, but it was suggested by a fellow Instagrammer, Karen Edward. Please visit her website here, and if you are ever in the beautiful East Neuk of Scotland you must visit Funky Scottish, her café and gallery!

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
Funky Scottish
41 High Street, Anstruther, Fife
Cakes, coffee, tasty lunches and beautifully made arts and crafts

Cats, cats and more cats! I am over a quarter of the way through my 100 Days Project. These scans of booklet No.2 show the (very) hand-made nature of the paper, my stitching, and the way I am working. I discovered this week that if I am using watercolours on this paper, which is very absorbent, I need to double up the pages to prevent bleeding through to drawings on the flip sides. I glued extra pages into the booklet to compensate, and now I am enjoying using watercolour freely. Some very sneaky cats and a cat burglar came out of this week!

So far the pages in this booklet have been in order, but they are now out of sequence. I number each drawing as it is finished (rather than by page number) and sometimes I get stuck and move on to a new drawing while I am thinking about how to resolve a problem with an earlier one; these drawings do not appear consecutively in the booklet, but go 24, 25, 29, 30, 26, 27 because drawing no.29 (which was going to be no.26) gave me a few problems which took a couple of days to work out, and in the mean time I finished the other two. 29 was worth the extra time and thought, and it turned out to be a big favourite!