A gate sprouting vines and flowers crowding to escape - poor Harold the custodian owl! I get the feeling that a full moon falling on a Friday, as happened this week, must be particularly potent. I put together the above image for Instagram as a spin-off from one of my recent illustrations. This week I reworked some of the illustrations for my own book of ditties. It's only when I'm some way along the road that I hit a mood for the illustrations and they begin to settle, so I spent a couple of days consolidating and updating some of the earlier ones; all are now looking good and consistent.
Before moving on to the next illustration, I spent the weekend working very quick sketches. It's the age-old dilemma; while working hard on a project which has to stay under wraps for a while, what does an artist do to maintain an online presence? I either reuse elements of an illustration and make them into something different (such as Harold the owl) or have a good, swift-working brain-storming session. It's a great exercise anyway and helps to loosen up. New ideas come spilling into the work with the rapid flow, and I end up with nice pieces for social media like this colourful reel and story I made for Instagram. To avoid chaos and inconsistency I find it best to stick to one method for fast work, which I hope makes a good counterpart to the finished illustrative work, and doesn't make me look too schizoid. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Brick walls and ladders were still a focus this week, with some more playing around with the themes. I enjoyed the visual storytelling of birds making use of a ladder, then the chaotic patterns of ladders below which was massive fun.
Above, nine details of two illustrations I am currently working on, and below, one of the illustrations converted for a post for social media. On Sundays I review what I have done during the week and select a couple pieces to work into something new. I find the exercise useful for opening my mind and exploring new directions. I particularly liked the simple honesty of Brilliant Day, it reminds me of vintage samplers or Quaker art.
This week has been mostly about a blossom tree and paving to illustrate my ditties Pink Bess and I Met a Man, which I intend to be laid out as a double spread. I have been experimenting with new ways of creating drawings, and enjoying giving each individual blossom an expression so they all appear to be having a conversation. Just one of those silly things I enjoy.
Amid the scorching heatwave we have here this week, it may seem a good idea for Kitty to take a cooling shower. It doesn't look like she is enjoying it very much. Below is how Kitty views the bathroom! ... a grim, scary place of horror, it looks like something out of a Slipknot video. And the tap isn't red for nice warm water, it's red for danger to poor Kitty.
These are spin-offs from my book of ditties I am currently illustrating, which are not in the slightest scary or heavy metal. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! The children's book is finished, images have been sent off, and the author is so delighted with them that she is polishing up the second story in the series for me to illustrate. In the mean time I am working on my own book, a collection of short ditties and doggerel verses I wrote several years ago, Because it's my own project I will be able to share more of it without a spoiler alert; I put together this little birdie in a tree from the first illustration. It's not as it will appear in the book, but it gives a general impression. I use a lot of hand lettering in my illustrations. Reflecting on the book I have just finished, I realise I have a 'lettering style', so I had fun practising it with this alphabet.
A limitation on my illustration work is that I can only work small on my old iPad Air. It's comfortable physically, but I can't made a double spread in one image, I have to work two separate pages. I have a maximum of 9 layers for the canvas size I use for each page in Procreate, but it gets tetchy and crashes a lot after about 6, so I have developed a method of saving the work, merging the layers, continuing with additional work on the image, merging again, and so on until the illustration is finished. I keep a work in progress folder on the MacBook where I store the documents with intact layers, and bounce back and forth by Airdrop between that and my iPad.
I faced similar issues when I was doing a lot of pattern-making, but developed methods to get around the limitations, which have come in unexpectedly handy now for working double-spread illustrations. This rolling sea image is a perfect example; above shows how it would look on a single page, below demonstrates how it flows across two pages when they are put together. Our beautiful Molly went home today, having ended her stay on a high note - a barbecue amongst the trees for our little community. As usual. B and I had our usual chicken tikka 'stand' in the row of barbecues (it does feel so much like doing a craft fair!) and Molly baked vegan millionaire's shortbread, lush with gooey caramel. High winds made it rather a lively do, with a big wind-break to stop the food on the communal table being tossed into the treetops.
Molly was actually working remotely from our home all week, so I was able to keep my head down and get on with the final stages of the children's book. It's a hair's breadth away from being completely finished. As always with these projects, content can't be shared which would be a spoiler, but I'm sure nobody will mind me showing the right hand side of a page background from the book today. 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! On Wednesday I made these two collages with last week's kite pattern, mixing them with a new version of a geometric design from last June, and a daisy one which is in progress at the moment. I am always trying out different ways to present my patterns in a lively way, rather than just showing them as a flat section. I am pleased with the freshness and clarity of these two. Thursday afternoon brought the glad arrival of two old friends from college days for an overnight stay, and on Friday morning I had a most valuable discussion about the book project I have been working on with pointers on how to approach my next one. I am enormously grateful to have learnt so much from my friend, and for his kind interest in my work, leaving me full of ideas. Then more joy followed on Friday evening when Molly arrived to stay for a week with us. All our happiness, however, was in direct juxtaposition with the incoming horrific news of the invasion of Ukraine. Just as we were beginning to feel things were returning to some kind of post-pandemic normality, forces of evil invaded the lives of hundreds of thousands of East European and Russian citizens, robbing them of their peace, security, and normal lives. In the light of current affairs, my happy work looks out of context; there can be little happiness for all those people at the moment, and my heart genuinely goes out to all those people affected by this unprovoked and barbaric action: not only the direct victims of the assault, but also to the people of Russia who do not want this war and do not condone these actions. I am trying to think of something I can do to express my support for them, but it all seems so trivial in the light of their sorrow.
I made a peace poster for Ukraine which I posted here on my Heather Eliza blog. 1. My beautiful goddaughter, Molly, turned 30 today - it doesn't seem 5 minutes ago that we were in the land of Tamagotchis, fluffy pens and Furbies, and only about 5 years ago when (she'll hate me for saying this!) I gave her her first pumpkin soup on Hallowe'en at the age of 9 months. She absolutely loved it, and couldn't get enough. A little while later B was totally the hero of nappy-changing.
2. I've had my head down all week and finished all the illustrations for the children's book I've been working on. I took ages designing the background pictured above for a double-spread, only to realise that the binding cut out the centre so it didn't match up (you'd never think I worked for years as a layout artist). A quick redesign sorted out the problem. 3. I learnt a new word from BBC's Winter Watch this week: coprophagous, or dung-eating. What a lovely word from the Greek kopros = dung + phagein = to eat. I think I feel a beetle drawing coming on ... 4. Storm Malik arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning. I was looking after Minnie the cat across the road, went out at 5am to let her in, and nearly got blown over by the wind. I found Minnie sheltering beneath a bush in her garden, and she didn't hold back in telling me what she thought of it. I thought her meow-meow-meow-ing would wake the neighbours. 5. It was Burn's night on Tuesday. To celebrate our handsome and virile Bard's life, B and I raised a few glasses of Scotch at dinner and we ate the most delicious Perthshire haggis, neeps and tatties. Mr Robert Burns was really a terrible rascal, but the Scots kind of admire that, especially as he cared deeply for his wife (dubbed the 'most patient wife in Scotland') and his many girlfriends. He bequeathed us all a legacy of beautiful love poems inspired by the women in his life which wind elegantly around his immersion in, and passion for, the nature which surrounded him. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! An immense relief to take a break from making artworks which are all digital clicks and numbers! It must be an annual thing, because exactly a year ago I was making works based on scenes I saw in rain-soaked cracks in the park pavements after the sun has burnt off the puddles. Perhaps the rain is just the right sort at this time of year, I know exactly when I'm going to get the best photos which inspire pareidolia. At first it was tough to get going on these, following an extended period of pattern-making and uploads of designs, but it soon came back to me. I wanted to get back into illustration mode because there is still some work to do on that children's book with author Amber Hunt. I made the image at the top first, a mermaid taking her catfish for a swim, for yesterday's caturday hashtag on Instagram; after that the work began to flow freely. These are two interpretations of the same pavement splodge, pictured below, I simply turned it a different way around for each - the mermaid in the first image here, and cheeky little winged doggie in the second. Thanks for visiting, see you next time!
The other day the world gave a deep sigh of relief, picked itself up, dusted itself down and moved ahead full of new energies and optimism. I don’t know if I’m imagining things, it’s below freezing here and there is snow and ice - but also blue skies and later sunsets, and in the adjusted angle of the sun there already seem to be whispers of spring and the colours of birds’ eggs, rivers, icing on a cake, such gleeful secrets full of hope.
Trump's last day and Biden's inauguration. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Just a little vignette I designed for the book this week, with cute bunnies by moonlight. The work is going really well, and I have been having fun designing a pattern using lots of little elements which appear in the story. I have also started on the design for the book cover, recovered some some missing text from the author and hand lettered the last page to match the first page. I see the hand lettered pages as being a sort of voice over introducing and closing the story - in the voice of Tom Baker!
Left: an umbel drawing which I have been working on for the children's book this week. Above: I particularly love the wild romantic treatment I gave it, using a couple of filters - it's kind of Granny's attic and old books. It puts me in mind of cyanotype photography. It won't be long until the illustrations are finished and I will be able to share full pics with the author's blessing. I am so looking forward to that, the book has been years in planning and now it's becoming real! Thanks for visiting, see you next week! |
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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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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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