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 This is the first weekend I have had to myself since mid-July. We have been incredibly busy since then: as an indirect result of the Edinburgh Festivals the day-job went crazy with 650 chairs to recover for the Scottish Assembly Rooms while they weren't in use in addition to all our regular work. Throw into the equation 3 lots of house guests, dog-sitting and cat-sitting to cover various owners' holidays, and different commitments in the evenings and weekends - you get the picture. I did manage to get some pattern-making done simply by stealing 5 minutes here and there, working in the car during lunch-breaks. I had set aside images for my blog but didn't get around to posting them so I back-dated those then made these two catch-up collages. Top row: Zico in the garden with a bolted rocket plant, hurrah! Molly arrived: modular fun with B, and Kirkcaldy beach with Zico Middle row: B's beautiful olive bread and squash soup; pizza making day (hilarious photo which Molly superimposed onto a Kirkcaldy beach pic; pizza looking like a 1970s cookery book photo which I love, Bottom row (pun intended): Rude food - Molly and I had fits of hysteria discovering a pair of buttocks in a butternut squash in Aldi, followed by spotting suggesive lollies (I thought we were going to get thrown out) - and somehow we managed to make some of B's rustic breads into more rude food. So, Wildflower Garden had a makeover with a rearrangement of the colour separations, and together with Crazy Daisies both were given new colourways based on old velvet shades and my favourite Peruvian cardi.
New work is underway, too ... Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Another day, another colourway and a new texture. I particularly like indigo and stone colours together, so I made a version of Crazy Daisies in just those two colours; plus a new loose-weave kind of hessian texture drawn up recently.
(PS I did something completely different with this texture over at Heather Eliza's blog!) The wildflower garden pattern I have been posting recently literally grew! I suddenly had the idea to expand the daisies to fit the spaces which surrounded them, then other elements expanded likewise, and this is the result. It is now one of my personal favourites, it just feels very 'me'. (My vintage tie daisy pattern is a close second, possibly even first equal).
I also made 2 new palettes recently: one was based on the colours from a lovely old velvet scarf I have, the other, pictured below, from a vibrant Peruvian hand-knitted cardigan I bought in A Mano in Camden, London, in the 1990s and still wear a lot - often with the velvet scarf for a marvellous colour display. By the way, these two are in the new clean linen texture I have been working on. I spent some time making a new linen texture for my pattern blogs; this one is a tighter weave and cleaner, without the blobs which added bags of character (but could be seen as stains). To the left below is the characterful one with the new one on the right as a comparison. I know it's not the best comparison using different colourways, but hey-ho.
Following a recent jaunt into abstracts and geometric patterns, it's back to florals again with a rework of one I made in May 2021. It's one of my favourites, but I hadn't made it into a half-drop back then, just a block print, which I thought was a shame because it deserved a better flow; so while I was still on holiday I revived and refreshed the original. Now it is flowing and has bigger, brighter (and fewer) colours than before. I also revived a linen texture I made ages ago to provide texture just for blog and IG posts - it looks charming! Wouldn't it be great if it looked like that actually printed on a linen weave? Here are a few more colour experiments. And, as often happens, while I was working on this one, some new developments came into my head which I will post here next week! I haven't yet mentioned a revisit to the abstract shapes I started back in January to kickstart the new year after the Christmas holidays. I had developed ideas for patterns, which I never got around to putting into repeat, so this is what I was working on before I took my holiday from work. This one is my favourite, in 6 colours. I like to limit colour palettes from time to time, harking back to the old days of colour separations and single colour print runs. As a matter of fact, because my iPad technology is somewhat outmoded (it's nearly 10 years old), this is still the way I work, using the layers in Procreate 4.3.8 for colour separations.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Our neighbours' daughter had her 16th birthday at the beginning of the week and it was about time I made some more cards for such occasions - so I got to work cutting and folding enough cards to last us the year. Working on greetings cards is a great excuse for trying out things I wouldn't normally do, but when I sat down to make something my mind went blank. I turned to a few little compositions I was making in Procreate last May for inspiration, and this is what happened - it came out looking like traditional Scottish painting. Not surprising really, because it was an obsession of mine while at Gray's in Aberdeen. The pattern outline tile for June Meadow 2023 version is now refined and finished. I simplified a few areas and tidied up loose ends (literally). It now works perfectly with colour drop, so creating different colourways is a seamless process. Even if I change my mind a dozen times about a certain area, I can now simply copy and paste in a new outline section where I want the changes, remove the old section, and fill with new colour without chewing up the edges. So I now have two versions of this pattern, one for day and one for night.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! The outline tile for this floral pattern is now finished, so I began working on colour experiments. These progress shots with lots of surrounding space are very pleasing to the eye. As well as trying out different colour fills, I experimented with using coloured outlines, giving a different cast to the hues of the pattern. I also made the outline disappear altogether by colouring it the same as the background, as can be seen in the image above. As always at this stage lots of new ideas popped up along the way, alongside quite a bit of troubleshooting - I found missing parts of line, things overlapping where they shouldn't and a few other of the usual suspects to amend. For example, as I started colouring in the outline drawing above, I noticed the leaf to the right of the coloured section was overlapping the large poppy just visible on the right edge, which made no spacial sense; the big poppy shouldn't be behind the plant next to it, which is already behind the coloured group. It halted the graceful upwards direction of the pattern, so I amended the drawing by neatly tucking the leaf in. The change can be seen to the left of the big orange poppy - now it's in a happy space and flowing nicely. I loved this quiet William Morris-type colour scheme against the dark green background. I saved this progress shot while playing around and will keep the idea for later. It probably doesn't look like it here, but these versions are very rough and ready and are definitely just sketches. I changed my mind about the colours so many times I exhausted the outlines with too many colour drops, and there are accidental ticks and smudges all over from too much handling, but after a few more colour tweaks I will have the references to make some lovely clean patterns.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! These flowers are inspired by one of the pages in the Voynich manuscript. I began working with a few small Voynich inspired florals in May and liked these compositions so much I decided to make bigger versions. Then I really got into the colours and made full separations so I can easily switch colourways, useful if I design a pattern with them in future or for making prints in different palettes.
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. The physical dimensions provided in Procreate are 38x38cm at 72dpi (if the resolution had been 300dpi, they would only measure 9cm). They may print absolutely fine at 15cm, being less than half the size of their physical dimensions. I tried the pot, bottom right of the 6 images, with the tiny zig-zags running downward (a detail most likely to show up poor print quality) on our home office printer, and from what I could tell it seemed to be fine. However, our printer is not professional quality. I won't know for sure until I take them along to a proper printer's and see what happens.
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! 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.
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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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