I'm taking this week off blogging to spend time with family staying with us, I'll be back again next week!

A Voynich inspired sketchbook page, above; I used a small pointed brush to suggest embroidery threads. By the way, I love the colourful rafia table mats which I have beside me all day, they have daisy shapes and are so cheery.
Below is day one of a watercolour sketch with interesting inky marks which I think look like silk, flowing over the slightly buckled paper.

It will be worked on further, using the Procreate sketches from last week as a reference, as this one pictured below - delicate, frondy and wispy and full of movement.

We'll see where the watercolours take me, I really haven't a clue at the moment! Also, I'm so focussed on the children's book at the moment that I'm not doing very much else, so it may be a little while until I get back to the watercolours.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

An accidental inspiration happened this week when I began switching off some visible layers on a little still life of a pot of flowers I made a couple of weeks ago. The result is pictured above left; much as I loved the zigzags which decorate the original, I was interested in the open drawing and the distribution of tones, colours and shapes accompanying the line-work. I began to experiment with opening up spaces on some Voynich based sketches.

This led me onto drawing flowers with lots of movement, as though blowing around in the wind. I don't know where the stylised pond at the base of the above image came from, it was just a sort of vision, but it does seem to contain the Voynich spirit ...

... and then I wondered how a Voynich inspired drawing would look with my favourite drawing of a cactus, both also bending in the wind. Why not?

I am loving my new texture I made for these and the way I am playing with transparency. I definitely see these works in Procreate as possible sketches for watercolour paintings.

More Voynich manuscript influenced flowers this week, experimenting with line and a softer texture in Procreate.

These spiky leaves reminded me of peacock feathers, so I brought in the jewel colours.
I am getting the urge to work with these new Procreate sketches in watercolour, splotchy inks and maybe collage - let's see what next week brings.

And this was yesterday's Caturday post on Instagram, distracted by a butterfly and not looking where he's going in a cactus garden. I particularly enjoyed the expressive cacti with all the little dots.

Still running along with Voynich inspired flowers this week, I set up 6 small canvasses in Procreate and worked through them quite quickly. I like to work this way, as it stops overthinking, keeps the work fresh, and is great for generating new ideas.
I didn't expect to like the works as much as I do, intending them at first to be just small digital collage sketches so I didn't pay any attention to how I set up the canvasses at the beginning. I discovered subsequently that they are all 72dpi, too low a resolution to make prints - I had just quickly copied a master I use for Instagram post, whereas I normally work at 300dpi. I had envisaged the six pictured above to be no larger than 15cm a piece if they were prints.

Cat in a huff - I am looking after Minnie the cat this weekend, and she is often spectacularly huffy, so funny. I also worked on a composition of coloured dots which I later made into a pattern.

I backdated this post because I took the day off for my birthday!

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

I had a refresh of colours, textures and subject matter this week. These flowering cactus collages (made inProcreate) had been hanging around in my workspace for a while but something wasn't gelling; however, a new approach to completely brought them to life. I wasted an awful lot of time trying unsuccessfully to get them to work (I liked the shapes and idea) until this refurbishment in new speckled textures and drawing captured exactly the right mood.

When I'm not designing patterns, I don't have to worry about making everything as clear as a cartoon. Close tones and subtlety are open to me, and these two cactus pieces were my favourites of the week's work. I particularly like the Japanese woodcut look of the blue one here - it's cool, flat and graphic yet soft, with its little pattern details derived from the spikes of a cactus.

These charming partying cats were created especially for Caturday on the May bank holiday weekend!

​Thanks for visiting, see you soon!

A bit of blatant escapism in the face of world situations getting worse instead of improving, and peace seeming to slip further away - all because of one, single, solitary man.
I have been working solidly on the children's book this week, this is a spin-off from one of the book pages. It doesn't give anything away about the book's contents and it's useful for me to see the chronology of the book's development in these adaptations of some of the illustrations; I posted another one today on my Heather Eliza blog. I'm working so flat-out on the book there hasn't been time for any new HEW drawings, but the aesthetic is so close to my drawings I decided to post it there.

Thanks for visiting, see you soon!

I liked the folksy Caturday collage so much I rejigged it, together with the Easter egg birds collage, into a square with a folksy border. 

I especially had throw pillows in mind, but both designs look super on the products I selected! I still get a big thrill from seeing my work on Redbubble's products.

You can visit my Redbubble here to see more.
Thanks for visiting, see you soon!

I called this "A twist in the tail" (sorry!) - it is another Instagram post for Caturday which began as a square format but I reckoned it would make lovely art prints and cards, so here is a landscape version and how it looks as a framed print.
I was so pleased with this I went on to redesign the Easter eggs birds in a similar fashion to make a matching pair. This is currently work in progress in my spare time as I push on with the children's book, which is going extremely well and I am sure it will not be long until I can begin sharing some of the work.

I have been cutting out a lot of bird shapes in mulberry paper in Procreate recently, so I quickly collaged this together for an Easter post. - birds bringing Easter eggs. A very Happy Easter to you! Such a lovely time of the year, the days are getting longer and the sun is out and blossoms and buds are happening.

Thanks for visiting, see you soon!

Feeling his inner tiger for Caturday, still inspired by those children's playground drawings; and working on colour schemes. I started with this hot spice palette because I thought it would be the hardest, and yes, it did present some problems but I thoroughly enjoyed the work. I always imagine mixing and matching duvet covers, pillows and cushions when I 'm doing this - I'd love to see it in real life.

Something about Ben's birthday brings out the monster in me! Not sure why, but last year I made him a monster popup card and this year it's a reversible card of ... monsters. There is no back or front, so Ben can chose whichever side to have on view - two cards in one.

I think Ben likes monsters - I hope he does, anyway. He is a YouTuber specialising in gaming videos, not something I'm au fait with, but I know he has a taste for the ghoulish and creepy. Not that my monsters are particularly either of those things, they look far too friendly and benign, and in fact these ones were inspired by children's chalk drawings I saw on the local primary school playground when out walking the dog.

The rain soon came along and washed them away but my favourites were captured in my imagination - not as wild and reckless as I remember the children's ones, and it was harder than I had supposed to capture the spirit (hence all the over-painting) but so much fun and I do love them! (I wonder if I could make a pattern from them?)

​Thanks for looking, see you soon!

This is a proper catch up session. I moved my blogs to publish on Wednesdays because I get through a lot of work over the weekends which I finalise at the beginning of the week, so it makes more sense; but now I have 10 days worth to talk about.

The headlines since my last entry are a new pattern (above), reworks of old patterns (top image and below) and a major reorganisation of my files and iPad.
​Reworks were mostly to create half-drop patterns from old grid ones, having decided I don't really want to make grid patterns in future because of their 'bang-bang-bang' appearance which works well for some designs, but my recent work suits either half drop or brick repeats.

For this rework I replaced some elements with ones I am interested in at the moment - so now it has constellations, planets, stars and a flying saucer instead of big round flowers and circle shapes. I have also made sure that I keep colour separations for changing colourways using clipping masks; previously I was relying on colour drop, but I have found there are good days and bad days for its success in iPad. On a good day all looks fine, but on a bad day the dropped colour creates a halo, omits pixels and renders edges shaggily on even the clearest and simplest shape. It's a bit rough and I require reliability and quality, so now I use colour drop only for quick sketches to see how a colour might work.
My major reorganisation was to create folders (stacks on iPad) for colourways so I can clearly see how designs work together in a set colour scheme. It was getting rather bitty and confusing, and I was losing track of what I had and hadn't done with each palette. It also makes it easier to offload work onto MacBook to free up space on iPad, then retrieve designs to continue work in another palette on iPad, where each stack now has its own 'header' image with its colourway clearly displayed.
It's a great feeling to clear everything down and establish order.

Thanks for visiting, see you next Wednesday, if not sooner with more catchups!

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!