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. Mono versions of 'River Moth Tonight' (I haven't thought of a better way to name this pattern yet) designed for single colour. The top one has papery texture, the two are below speckled. It's always interesting to see how the graphic nature of a design works in single colours.
It was time to clear away all the fallen leaves today in our neighbourhood annual 'leafathon', a sociable and fun tradition which dates back goodness knows how many years (we moved in as a young family in 1971). Even after 1984 when I lived outside of Scotland I would make it a date to come home and lend a hand before I moved back in 2006, and in fact B's daughter now does the same, travelling up from Englandshire to bag a few leaves when she can make the date. Eventually, B and I kept the house for our own following my parents' passing, so hardly a year has gone by when I have missed it - but this year I was unable to make it. I had some horrid bug (not covid, according to my nearly out-of-date home tests), felt ghastly, and judged it wise not to risk passing it on to some of the older residents. So I sadly stayed in the house and watched everyone having a great time from the window with a strong sense of FOMO. Ironically, the illustration above was made in 2019, just as Covid19 was sneaking into the country through the back door.
I started making this night moth garden design on October 1, following along from ideas in Crazy Daisies with elements expanding into surrounding spaces until they are almost touching. I visited it on and off for about 3 weeks, during which time I swore I heard music on the radio a few times singing "this is the river-moth tonight" which I thought was lovely (it turned out to be "this is the rhythm of the night", just another of my hilarious misheard lyrics). The image of moths in gardens on a summer night was as stuck in my head as the song. The pattern lay around on my iPad without any further experiments until this week, when I gave it the bark paper texture overlays I was using for my folksy patterns. Tonal variations from the bark fibres embedded in the paper give the colours a rich, velvety feel in this design. It's unlikely I would print a something like this onto fabric as there is already enough texture in the material, but it could work well on smooth paper, so I always make my textures repeat just in case. Here is how the 'bigger picture' works. I manipulated inverted colours in this version, and now it looks like marble inlays.
I've been experimenting with a bark paper texture, which brought this folksy pattern I made last year to life together with a slight adjustment to the colour separations. I converted it to make the Hallowe'en version in the previous post, also given the papery treatment - I like the scrap-book feel which has revived and refreshed the pattern.
I know it's bonfire night but I'm not feeling it this year, too much stress for dogs and other pets, so no fireworks pictures today. I have noticed much less activity on the Guy Fawkes front this year locally. I hate to sound preachy, being one who prefer a more laisser-faire approach, but loud explosions and waste of resources seem inappropriate and anachronistic on all levels of our present political climate, so best to let it lie for now I think; perhaps it's time for some quiet reflection and reframing how we interact with our world instead of celebrating huge fires and spectacular expensive rockets for the sake of a few minutes' entertainment. A redesign of my Crazy Daisies pattern for single colours. Shown here are versions in indigo on stone, and cream on chocolate which is based on a mono version of my vintage tie daisy pattern which I made in 2021. I thought I had posted an entry with the monochrome version of the vintage tie pattern when I made it, but when I went back through the archives to link to it I found I hadn't, so I have put it below. I made it in Procreate using the charm of a crayon brush, but later I made pristine versions of both the coloured and monochrome versions for printing on fabric.
During the week I got out my Crazy Daisies pattern again to make an autumnal colour version in a speckled texture. I made a slight change to the colour separations at the same time, moving the eye of the red flower in the centre onto a different layer (blue-grey as seen here). In the process, I copied each colour layer into a fresh document and spotted a missing leaf. I guess while I was designing it I must have added a leaf and forgot to put it into the repeat (no automated technology here!) I'm just amazed I didn't notice it before now. I think it pays to put work to one side for a while before examining every angle of the repeat, sometimes I'm too excited with a new design to notice flaws at the time. All versions of Crazy Daisies have now been amended.
Happy with this one! Quite a few permutations on since I began with the first willow pattern, we now have the expanded blossoms together with cute rounded leaves and some spiky christmas-cactus-like shoots, shown here in two colourways. Above shows a new, smoother linen texture in Peru-inspired colours; I tweaked the colours in the version below for a pastel colourway.
I settled on the version which uses all the flower centres in the same colour for these two colourways, liking the inky effect speckle texture I made for the catkins pattern a couple of weeks ago so much that I added new colours to the palette. All based on earthy ink pigments, here are ochre and sienna beside the original indigo and blue. I think the speckle texture suits these patterns, it's not ideal for everything but sits well on smaller elements like these; I imagine them printed on soft cotton.
My tree now started sprouting in a different direction with blossom flowers and tiny fruits! In a similar way to Crazy Daisies, I extended blossom petals to fit the space around them. I made two versions with different colour separation arrangements. I can't decide which one I like the best, but I feel the version pictured above is easier on the eye, being more organised with the flower eyes all red and the leaves all green. This version split the colour separations so the leaves and eyes of the flowers are together on the same colour, so there are green and red eyes and green and red leaves in a jolly arrangement. You have to imagine the effect flowing across fabric as it moves, say on a dress or curtain material - I really am undecided, perhaps I'll use both for different palettes in the end.
Now that I had my new Catkins pattern, I was excited to experiment with different colourways and textures. Above shows a speckle texture in indigo and sepia, suggestive of ink drawings or woodcut prints. The four colourways below have been given a linen texture, and they show how the simplest of tweaks to colours and backgrounds radically affect a pattern to the extent it almost looks like a completely different design, even the scale of elements appears to change. This is why experiments like these are so exciting. Having omitted all the little sprigs between the branches of the tree (which suggested willows waving in a riverside breeze) from this pattern, I was happier that the design would print better. My concern was that the spriggy lines were so fine they would run into each other and look a bit mushy with random solid fills. One of the reasons I overlay textures is to get a feel for how a design might print on textiles, in this case I think it was helpful in avoiding pitfalls.
From this point, a different inspiration came along ... To be continued Once I was happy with the pattern and repeat, I began to wonder if my design was a little too crowded. I couldn't help noticing when I was working in layers the pattern looked good with more space surrounding the main elements when the layer with the frond outline details was toggled off; it was fighting for dominance with the bobbly catkins design. I simplified the fronds layer, as shown above. It was now in balance and more relaxed. Then I wondered about removing the fronds altogether, and redesigned the leaf layers, shown above in pink and blue. Very nice! - but then I realised I had created a completely new pattern. so, where to go from here?
To be continued ... I made this drawing in coloured inks in March 2019, with pattern-making in mind: I blogged about its early stages here. The drawing is a little chaotic in this state and I didn't know how to go about using it at the time, but I thought I made a start on basing a design on it a couple of weeks ago. This is the start: the colour scheme was just for clarity, not intended as a final colourway. The half drop was too shallow for such a busy design, the stems stumpy, and I wasn't keen on the lean at this stage. I picked out which was to form the main tree-like motif and redrew the stems to make them more slender and a bit knobbly. I also set it more upright to get rid of the lean, and made improvements to the frondy bits sprouting from the stems. Here is the first stage of the new repeat, quite a pretty motif on its own, but I wanted it to cover the whole surface, so at this stage work had to be done to make it into a continuous flow. This is how the pattern looks now after additional elements were inserted and interwoven with the main motif. I tried it out with a repeating linen texture I have been working on, and it looks very nice. It makes me think of willows with catkins gently swaying in the breeze beside a big old river. However, the story of this pattern doesn't stop here ... To be continued ...
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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.
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March 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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