On Thursday afternoon I took the dog for a walk and found the park teeming with school children, most unusual at that time of day. I walked past a group of very small children who had chalks and appeared to be drawing on the path. Their teacher was spelling out words for them, and I realised the little ones were writing greetings such as 'Hello Lovely' and 'You're beautiful', with a few spelling variations! I smiled and walked on, wondering what was going on;
The following afternoon B came with us on our walk, and I realised what had been going on. Every path in the park contained chalked messages of hope, encouragement, affirmations and joy. It was a wonderful thing to see and genuinely cheering. I don't know whose idea it was, but it was such a sweet thing to do in these troubling times and I thank them and the children for a beautiful project. I took my phone with me today to snap a few photos, I haven't really done it justice - these were all written on just one path, and it's challenging trying to hold a phone still with a greyhound skittering about on her lead. The schools are closed now, so I guess it was an 'end of term' project which brought everyone together in a positive light before all went their separate ways. Thanks for visiting, stay safe, and see you next week Sometimes it's hard to keep going when the news around the world keeps on getting worse. I have to say my work was plain old ornery this week and I achieved very little. However, some good things did happen to bring cheer; B's son (my godson) came to stay for the weekend with his friend in their fancy drift cars, which turned some heads. The energy of the young people was positive and the company most welcome. My very good friend had her birthday, too, and I made her the cute card above right which I liked.
I have wanted to draw the little plant mister above left for the longest time, so in the face of nothing else working I decided to give myself a treat and do it. I enjoyed it very much, I love its form and delicate little details and I decided not to clean it up too much, but to leave shivery lines here and there which seemed appropriate and expressive. Sometimes I feel when work feels stale and forced it's a good thing to have a break and do something just for oneself; it often injects something into the stuff that isn't working, bringing it back to life. I have a wonderfully wonky old candle stick which I might draw next. This is how B and I spent our Christmas afternoon - modelling like crazy! These great gifts were from Molly and her husband Ben: miniature kits. Mine was a pack of coloured play clays, referencing my pottery days, with instructions to make a Happy Llama. I did, and made him a little friend and a garden of flowers with the leftovers - I had the best time playing and inventing. B’s kit was a little racing car, rather more challenging than my kit and took more time to build, which kept him busy and in his element all afternoon. It’s so cute and beautiful, and goes really fast on its tiny wheels - not dissimilar to the Caterham 7 he used to run before the Lotus Elise he has now, so it's clear where the inspiration for this gift came from!
We have a £5 Christmas gift rule in our family, and it is great fun. Nobody must spend more than £5 on each other, just put as much thought and imagination as possible into finding a gift. One year I made Theo a bunch of sock monsters using all the odd socks I collected during the year left behind after his stays with us; this year he gave his time to replace the aged fuse-box with a modern trip system for our Christmas present. For our part, B and I had a lovely afternoon tracking down gifts for under a fiver in the pound shop - we found a 1000 piece jigsaw for Molly the demon ‘puzzer’ for £4.99, and horror slime with a spider in it plus an Aldi Beard Wash for her husband Ben, eminent YouTuber Beardo Benjo who specialises in horror gaming. Look out for a beautifully groomed beard on his channel! Thanks for visiting, see you next week - or next year, should I say! Check Fizz Creations for Make-Your-Own kits and other cool products! The chestnut trees outside my window are fruiting! Summer is progressing, and it won’t be long until it is conker season once more. The blossoms have given way to tiny, pale green fruits which I can see growing bigger by the day. Curious to get a closer look, I spent some time squinting up at the trees (I used to climb them as a youngster!) I found some young, underdeveloped nuts fallen in the grass which look a bit like plums, sporting tiny bumps on their skin where spikes would grow. I know it’s a well-trodden path, but I’m in awe that these tiny, encapsulated nuggets put down roots and simultaneously shoot sprouts into the air which grow into enormous beings with a lifespan far longer than we humans.
Coincidentally, I am working at the opposite end of the chestnut cycle in my drawings over at The Weekly on my HEW website, drawing chestnuts which had begun to root and sprout, but perished and shrivelled up. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I do like a week that starts with a new moon on Monday. It feels like a fresh start, rich in potential for new beginnings and adventures. This Monday was ... interesting. It started with an unintentional mashup of the Happy Days lettering idea I was working on last week. I opened the PSD document with layers in Preview by mistake and saved as a Jpeg, resulting in mangled transparent areas. It has a great 1950s vibe! I then went on to flood the kitchen at lunch time (left a tap running, plug in sink, nipped out to the bins, got distracted, 30 mins later = major flood). At least we had all clean drawers and cupboards, not to mention a spotless floor by the time we mopped up - that's a good new beginning.
On Tuesday I made a sunny composition of poppies and butterflies, thinking it would look good on tote bags. It didn't, but I discovered how to enable Kids' Clothing on Redbubble, which is great because I think a lot of my designs suit children's clothing better than adult. During the remainder of the week I made a new colour palette and reworked the Happy Days lettering. I wanted something cleaner and brighter to really look happy, and here is the result! Hopefully things will settle down now we have passed the new moon, and tomorrow brings the first quarter. No more floods and mashups. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! It’s a Wednesday mid-weekly today, because I got out of the studio over the Easter weekend. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday presented the most beautiful, hot sunny weather. I caught up with laundry and gardening in the mornings, but I also set myself an art challenge for the afternoons to work in a completely different way from usual: I was not to make my habitual line drawings coloured in with watercolour, but instead to paint with gouache directly onto paper.
This week I discovered I really like working in close-toned stripes and had a bit of a 1970s revival, plus at the weekend we began an exciting project rescuing period stained glass windows which my Dad saved from the house across the road in the 90s when it was modernised. We are rebuilding them for a window in the house with a Space Invaders theme, this is the first digital mock-up using pieces of original glass - it should be great when it's done! 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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