The exuberance of spring, and my workroom warming up enough to sit in there for longer than 3 minutes resulted in the annual burst of joy at getting back to real materials! See March and April of last year. I started on a few watercolours during the week. It wasn't that easy to find my groove after a few months of digital-in-the-dark-days work, but after a couple of false starts the ease and looseness began to flow. I am also experimenting with something new to me: working watercolour together with coloured pencils. I have always been more of a gouache girl. Still working on iPad before it gets completely light in the mornings, I also finished this camping pattern with colourful teepees, an idea I have had in the background for a couple of weeks. I am enjoying compiling these collages of my work from the week and posting them on my Instagram. I am using lots of bright new colours right now, which I love - it's great to lighten up. Here we have watercolours, dots and teepees from the week alongside weekend revisiting work from last year - and a new profile pic.
Thanks for visiting, see you soon! Big, bright and bold is the current mood - still catching up on last week's work, having been hampered by getting locked out of my accounts due to password security alert.
The sun is rising early now, which means getting to work early and lots of new things on the go. I completely reworked the possums pattern into a half-drop. I had convinced myself I liked the original 'quickie' block or grid print I made previously, but it really was a bit rigid and I was so much happier with this. The variety of scale and new incidental motifs is much more engaging, simple, and natural - just the way I like it. At the same time, I went big and bold with dots and geometric abstract designs - it was such a hot week of flowing ideas! Here is a composite of some of the new designs. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
It's been a week of possums! Last June I challenged myself to make a pattern very, very quickly, and what I came up with then formed the original idea for this new design. It took rather longer this time, working with 11 colour separations for any number of colour combinations. Above is a block (or grid) repeat I worked in a few colours, and below is a brick repeat which I haven't yet played around with in different colours.
I lost my stylus for this entire week. It meant I couldn't work properly on my iPad without it, so little in the way of new work this week, but luckily I had these two collages I made last week to post here today. Until I lost the stylus I had not realised my level of attachment to it; we have been through so much artwork, so much discovery, and so much delight together. It had become a natural extension of my hand and therefore to my brain, and that hand felt quite bereaved without it.
From the title of this post you can probably guess what happened, but if you would like to hear the whole story, read on ... |
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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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April 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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