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 I had some horrid bug (not covid, according to my nearly out-of-date home tests), felt ghastly, and judged it wise not to risk passing it on to some of the older residents.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.
A few adjustments to colour and tones, and I also found a faulty leaf! It was such a tiny fault on a crossover section of the pattern it may not even have shown up, but I don't leave things which could come back and haunt me later so I fixed it. It took ages to not only to correct a few pixels' worth and put the section into repeat with the rest of the pattern, but to amend all versions of the work I had made so far, going right back to the first outline drawing. I wanted the crows to feature some blue, but I felt the black lines looked too heavy. I tried recolouring the lines but nothing worked well until I went for the partial recolour option above. This is what the layer beneath the main pattern, used for touch-ups and fills for areas too small for colour-drop, looks like - I like its sketchy, painterly look. There's something quite vintage (perhaps 1930s - 40s) which I can image printed on a flowing, soft crepe material.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! The freedom I have to produce different colourways in my crows and berries pattern: above, hot pinks, and below is a work in progress in blues. The blue version above is still in quick block-filled form with a few colour decisions to be made. It is quite a slow process and you may spot some missing white spots around the edges where I need to touch in and refine on a layer underneath the pattern. Also, the black lines on the crows are looking a bit heavy for some reason, something I need to address - but it's getting there.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Today is a double post with my Heather Eliza journal, not something I do very often. However, these chairs started 10 years ago (almost to the day) as drawings in a Heather Eliza sketchbook which I traced this week and featured in my Heather Eliza journal, where I have written a little about how they were originally made. During the week I suddenly had the idea to get a T-shirt made for work with upholstery in-jokes on badly drawn chairs (because I am an upholsterer and seamstress by day) - I thought the lads at work might find it amusing. I remembered the old wonky chair sketches which I thought would be great for the job, and got them out to give them the Binky treatment. Here is a quick attempt at a T-shirt design. I'm a big fan of raglan sleeve baseball T's, so this style is what I would get for myself if I did decide to get one. Here is a suitably upholstery-type cheeky-looking young man modelling my design on my Redbubble: Below is a continuation of the crows pattern I have been revamping, beginning to add colour. It's actually quite slow work, a lot of touching-in has to happen as I go along, but that is over-ruled by the freedom I now have with this pattern to create different colourways. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
At the moment I am still patiently working my way through recreating some of my favourite patterns I made over the last two years in a clear, clean style. I am now able to drop colours to fill the strong outlines, which I can either leave black for a comic book look or 'lose' by making them the same colour as the fill. This process gives me an enormous amount of freedom to use different colourways now, previously I could only change the background colour; and they should print a lot better on fabric than previous versions. The very first version used folksy birds which I still find absolutely charming, but I know from experience its subtlety would be lost on fabric (it may work as a wallpaper printed at high resolution). I dropped the folksy birds in favour of crows, just because I love corvids, but I may make a new version using the folksy birds as well. Here is the new version at the very beginning, tracing my line over a greyscale version of the pattern without any birds at this stage - still a long way to go!
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! In 2018 I made several artworks on the subject of crows. I do love crows, colonies of these beautiful birds inhabit the tall trees around our house. They combine the macabre - Nature's cleaners, carrion eaters - with their dark beauty and excellence as parents. I have seen two crows desperately nurturing a young fledgling fallen from the nest with such tenderness until it was strong and able to fly, defending it from all dangers every day and night. I have been revisiting those works, cleaning and clarifying, and making a stylised drawing to use in a pattern. I was hoping to have finished the pattern by today but it is still in tweaking process. The basis for the pattern came from my Birds and Berries pattern I worked in July which was beautiful, but way too subtle for reproduction as a textile, and recently I woke up one morning with the idea to replace the decorative birds I used originally with more edgy crows. I ran with that in the new, clear style and was much happier, a work in progress screenshot shown above. I am thinking of making prints from these cleaned-up originals, the poetry and inkiness of the crows has an otherworld quality. When my parents died I was convinced their souls were still inhabiting the environs of the house and garden in crow form, looking over me and protecting me, and I still look up to the trees and speak to them.
When I was living amongst the mountains of rural Perthshire a local farmer used to hang dead crows by their feet all around his lambing fields. He told me it was to deter the crows, who would come in the spring and peck the tongues out of the mouths of new-born lambs. The lambs would subsequently die because they couldn't feed. It's a gothic horror story of nature's wild, untamed force associated with crows. It adds to their frighteningly powerful dark side. I suppose lambs' tongues must be some kind of superfood for the crows' young, or perhaps a great delicacy, and I can't help being reminded of King Crimson's 1973 album Larks' Tongues in Aspic which I loved when I was in my mid teens. I will have an update of the finished pattern very soon, I hope - to go from bees to bottles in total mood contrast, I have to get on with making this years' Christmas cards this coming week! Thanks for visiting, see you soon! Back to work on the children's book illustrations (which naturally i can't share until the book is out), but here is a drawing I made during a limbering-up session - a crow breathing flowers to herald in the spring. I know it's a bit soon to start thinking about spring flowers, although the snowdrops are already out in my garden; last year we had The Beast From the East blow in about 10 inches of snow overnight on the last night of February. The snow slid off our roof above the kitchen door and made a pile that nearly covered the door to the top, making it impossible to get out that way! It's not uncommon for us to have snow in March here in Scotland, so I suppose we still have all that drama to get through before the flowers really come out! 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.
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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