19 May

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.