I kicked off my Christmas crafting this year with this 'card' for Molly and Ben. We had all agreed no presents this year, but to hand-make cards instead. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do as a special card for them until B turned up with a broken hot water bottle. The stopper had failed, unsurprisingly as the bottle is really quite old now. He was about to throw it in the bin when I stopped him and cut out the textured section for printmaking - then the idea came to me to make it into a sort of picture frame. Much fun with a hot glue gun later, here is Molly and Ben's Christmas card! I have written about the one I made for our Mr. T with a description of the materials used on my Heather Eliza blog, more or less the same as used here, except for the addition of a butchered Christmas decoration on this one.
These two cards are a little different from the rest of the Christmas cards I made this year, I was just trying out everything and experimenting, but B really liked them! I thought they were a bit too chaotic and the hot glue gun got too messy to glue the foil snowflakes in large numbers, but I trimmed these two up and mounted them for our cards to give to each other on Christmas day. They are rather fun!
I started making birthday cards back in early July, but only got one done - so now all the December and January birthdays are coming up fast, I had to get on with serious card-making. Luckily I had cut and folded all the card backings, so just the images to make up and mount to do now. I started out without the faintest idea of what I was going to do, but after a few experiments and fails this is how they started: a sheet of sprigs. Some wax resist drawn onto them with a candle stump, watercolour and a selection of rubber stamps later and hey presto - enough cards to last until next summer. Of course, there are families and couples and I don't want to send the same card out to these folks, so there are companion cards in a different style which I made up at the same time - see those on my Heather Eliza blog.
Still on the papery mono theme, I separated out some of the main motifs from the 'rivermoth' pattern (last week's post), tweaked them to suit, and designed a couple of extra motifs to accompany them to create two new patterns. I had noticed when I was working on the 5-colour version that each layer looked good when visibility on the other layers was toggled off; the space around each element was nice and I wanted to use it. I activated the spaces with
surrounding elements, adding little houses with puffing smoke and some delicate sprigs in the brown version, and curly clouds and some new flowers in the blue one. |
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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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