I've just had so much fun putting this collage of different work together. Yesterday I reactivated my Twitter account, which I haven't used in ages, and made a new header for my profile to jazz it up a bit. This is it rearranged in portrait form, and I actually love the mix of different images.
Incidentally, Twitter is so much better than it was when I was last using the platform. I will definitely be spending more time there in future. My Twitter handle is, guess what: BinkyMcKee - you got it! Just the same as Instagram . 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. Thanks for visiting, see you soon!
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! Catfish for Caturday, I thought why not? In a week which has been rather slow and uneventful (spring cleaning has begun, and the Christmas decorations are still locked away in an upstairs room for repairs before heading loftwards) it was rather nice to think out of the box.
Monday: I performed my yearly ritual of drawing up charts of sunrise and sunset times to see just how much more daylight we have since the winter solstice. I calculated 1 hour and 3 minutes, but by the time I write this journal entry it will be even more, as we are steadily gaining 4 minutes and counting every day. Tuesday: the first day of February is here! It's a great month, as the sun gets brighter and higher in the sky. There are shoots coming up all over the garden, and I dream of all the lovely flowers we will have. Wednesday was Candlemas, a day I really like; the thought of blessing candles is wonderfully Gormenghast - I can visualise some strange ancient ceremony of the Groan family being conducted in the castle. The best thing, though, is arranging garden snowdrops in a posy vase and lighting lots of candles, celebrating the lighter days and higher angle of the sun. (I took some photos of our snowdrops and posted them on my HEW blog). Thursday and Friday were about getting organised. My work room is cluttered with some Christmas decorations which were taken down on twelfth night. While most went back into the loft, others required packaging materials, replacement parts, and a bit of mending before they join the others the loft, so a couple of Amazon orders were required. I feel the need to get my room back! Saturday saw the completion of the second stage of the cover artwork for the children's book I have been illustrating, also this week; next week will be the third stage, and maybe the final. For fun in the evenings I often play about with my pareidolia creatures, making up little visual stories as I introduce them to one another. I made the one pictured above this week, and this one below a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
Once again trick-or-treating was only virtual this year with rising Covid cases, but I was delighted to see our local young families dressed to the nines having an outdoor Hallowe'en met-up in our communal grove. Even the youngest baby was fierce in a lion costume in his witch-mummy's arms with proud swashbuckling pirate dad at her side, and there were all sorts of dinosaurs and monsters! So here are my own little trick-or-treaters wishing everyone a Happy Hallowe'en, quite a motley crew to turn up on your digital doorstep. I had great fun making them into a rogue's gallery, too. Thanks for visiting, see you again soon!
Still collecting colour ideas for my school days pattern, playing with limited palettes on selected motif sections and also trying out different colours for the line work, often mixing them up with some of my character drawings like this juggling panda. They add interest to a sketchbook page. The old school days pattern is now bouncing into life in full glorious technicolour! I have three colourways on the go, and thanks to a sleepless night I got a bonus pattern out of it when I started working with some of the motifs I separated. I know a lot of people who jigsaw puzzle on a sleepless night, pattern making is my jigsaw. If I can't sleep, I pattern. It's so absorbing it drives out those scary middle of the night thoughts like why is the Universe and does it have a pattern and if it doesn't, how do we handle the chaos without starting religious wars. I love how jolly this looks, and it really has that 1970s authentic look because the original was made in the 70s, in my teens when I was so into the style, as I still am but have forgotten a lot about it. Would my schoolgirl self ever have thought I would still be working with this nearly 50 years later? Maybe! I'm still the same person, after all, and just about old enough to be my own granny. Okay, it's getting weird now, so I'm going -
Thanks for visiting, see you soon! These two little bears I drew earlier in the week look so dorky they made me think of space cadets. Something must have crept in unconsciously, because at the time I hadn't realised what a big space week lay ahead ... On Wednesday William Shatner, Star Trek's beloved Captain James T. Kirk, blasted into space at the age of 90 aboard Blue Origin's NS-18 suborbital flight of the New Shepard spacecraft. Looking out of the window he had an overwhelming vision: the Earth teeming with life, in contrast to the deathly span of space. He commented: "We need to take care of the planet, but it's so fragile. There's this little tiny blue skin that is 50 miles wide, and we pollute it, and it's our means of living." (Video and article on Space) Shatner's (or should it be Captain Kirk's?) comments have been hailed as an 'ode to planet Earth'. I'm not surprised, there is poetry everywhere in this. As if this wasn't enough, yesterday satellite Lucy was launched on a mind-blowing mission to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids in search of clues as to how planets formed at the beginning of time as we know it. The asteroids are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets. (Article and animation at Nasa) Apparently the satellite will never come back to land on Earth, it will just fly around in orbit for 100,000 years. I'm not sure if that is fascinating or really, really scary. As for these two, back on Planet Earth, I'd love to know what that cat just said to the bear! Cat is clearly huffy and the bear offended. I don't know how these expressions get onto some of my characters, but put together they form a most comedic narrative.
Thanks for visiting, see you again soon! The weather has been so dark and rainy this week the light was too poor to get much drawing done, so I spent more time than usual working on my iPad. The flat and even qualities of my recent pattern-making work is inspiring and I played some more with putting flat elements over grungy textures, and this is what happened. For a long time I have wanted to develop some little characters from a pencil drawing of a group of toys and cats in one of my sketchbooks. I thought I had lost it, but I was delighted when I found it safe and well back in April, and thought to use these little bears to inhabit the flowers and talk. The way I lettered the word 'lost' at first looked a bit like 'toast' which I thought was funny, so in no time I had this pair - from wistful to a fistful! What I enjoyed working with the bears was finding the best way to keep the feel of the original pencil drawing. After a few false starts this turned out to be to separate each creature in Procreate and draw directly onto it. Some of the original drawing on paper still shows through, which provides a lovely ground of texture and varying tone. This way I was able to firm up and clarify ideas in the original drawing while keeping the innocence of pencil marks. I am looking forward to see how it looks when I eventually remake the original drawing in colour.
I also finished the outline work for the 'collaboration' with my younger self this week, tidying up and adding new elements. There are no spaces left there now, and the pattern fits nicely - more on that later when I start adding colour. Thanks for visiting, see you soon! This morning I was getting Instagram and blog images ready for posting when, poking around in Procreate, I saw this collection of creatures in one document close by my 'digital sketchbook', a collage of textures spread like pages I put together back in February. It was a complete coincidence, I had only imported the sketchbook document the other day to look for something unrelated to the beasties. The two images were talking to each other so well I thought to put them together, and loved the result. The dark background is the original pavement photo I originally set the collection of beasties against last week which I liked well enough, but this is so much more fun! The colours and textures work off one another so well, a chance encounter has become quite a new favourite.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Sea creatures and birds all in the same place - well, why not. In the combined world of pattern-making and pareidolia these things really don't matter! This new pattern is made from last week's creatures I found in water-stained pavements in the park. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
Midweek bonus post - I made a pattern from all the pareidolia creatures I have created so far, set in a cloudy sky.
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!
This week, some of my monsters developed two heads! - inspired by insects which often display a big scary face on their body or wings which isn't actually their face. At long last I worked out how to make Reels on Instagram with the image top left, above, and set it to "What's that coming over the hill" by The Automatic - great fun.
Still working in my sketchbook, I developed the floral theme a little further with my adoration of ikebana. I love the gravity-defying weirdness where truth is indeed stranger than fiction as they spring from preposterously tiny vases or shallow bowls apparently supported by nothing but moss. I am also preparing some textured Fabriano Rosaspina, a heavy card-like printing paper, for stand-alone works. I'm getting texture by adding whiting to my primer and using lots of scumbling. Yesterday I had some weekend fun making small yellow flowers from one of the paintings into a repeat pattern, which I am calling Pansy Riot. Can't wait to see it on some products. |
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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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