 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.
 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!
 Synchronised flying! I became very interested in this collage when the birds suddenly became a pattern in the landscape, it's a novel combination. I'm sure it's got something to do with living beneath the flight-path of geese crossing the sky to and from a local nature reserve. They form huge skeins and the air is full of their chatter and gabble as they pass over, a beautiful thing indeed. The geese here are one of my pareidolia finds in damp patches on paths on the park.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week!  Revisiting pareidolia drawings and the south east coast of Fife, this work is typical of a trip to the fishing villages at this time of year - little cars parked on the front, probably sheltering people inside with flasks of soup and sandwiches, or perhaps eating delicious fish and chips bought from the local shops, looking out over a rainy River Forth.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week!  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!  Sea-urchins were the theme of this week. One afternoon I felt so tired I couldn't think about work, so I settled on the sofa with iPad, stylus, and old movies on TV to doodle in Procreate's symmetry mode. I kept the lines simple and calligraphic, then offset the symmetry with non-symmetrical coloured blobs underneath. They began to look familiar and I couldn't think why as I began to arrange them into a pattern. Then I noticed I had been sitting working close to a sea-urchin shell, a treasured item for about 45 years which has been everywhere with me (read more of the story on Instagram). A while ago it broke. I was upset, but the fracture is clean and the pieces fit together, so now it sits apparently whole on the windowsill - clearly exerting an influence on my work. The first drawings were in pastel shades closer to the shell's natural colours, but I like the neon colours; they evoke a sense of mysterious, glowing creatures on a dark ocean bed. I designed the next pattern crowded with sea-urchins in jewel colours. There's enough going on in this one to satisfy even my sense of horror vacui.  Thanks for visiting, see you next week ...  This week I reconstructed Dog Days Friday, pictured below. It was the only one of the series of seven artworks which I either didn't save as a PSD file or lost, the only record I had was a screenshot of its Instagram post. It involved quite a lot of rummaging around in my archives to gather together all the constituent parts, but seeing artworks I had forgotten inspired the little scene above: some pareidolia creatures putting on a play.  On the subject of Instagram, this Friday I was interested to read Lisa Congdon's thoughts on how Instagram has changed over the last 10 years, which totally echos my feelings in so many ways. She was in the vanguard of Instagram from day one (over ten years ago). Today she has made nearly 11,000 posts with a following of 442k. By contrast I made my 458th post today, consider myself blessed to have 707 followers, and didn't join Instagram until 2014 when I got my first iPhone - but even on such a modest scale I have experienced the same disappointing changes. I have written a bit more about it on Heather Eliza's blog.
Visit Lisa Congdon's website and shop - she really is some kind of superwoman! Must try harder ... Thanks for visiting, see you next week!  I had the best fun making this pop-up birthday card for Beardo Benjo (emminent YouTuber)!
Last week I just happened to stumble across a Zoom make-along with two wonderful women I follow on Instagram. I had no idea how a pop-up card worked and became very interested, just in time to make this monster card for Ben. It was gloriously messy, sticky, painty and I loved it. My thanks to the generosity of: @deborah.j.stein @sara.hand_art.and.wonder @storycampdisco  Happy Easter!
We always made drawings of Easter eggs in primary school which were proudly mounted on sugar paper to display on the classroom walls before being taken home for the holidays and presented to doting parents. I used to make so many Easter cards when I was a young girl for my parents, grandparents, my godmother and a couple of other special aunties. They have all passed on now and Easter cards aren't so much of a thing in my life any more, which is rather sad. So this year I decided to recreate those primary school gems from memory and post them on Instagram as Easter cards for everyone! I made three in total to post on Holy Saturday, Easter Day, and Easter Monday. I even made one with a dark brown background in memory of the sugar-paper - whenever it came to my turn for mounting my drawing at school, only the dark brown colour was left.  I challenged myself to make a pattern in 15 minutes just to see if I could do it! Still on the 'riso' texture I created, I quickly drew these little creatures and some plants. I got them into a simple block, or grid, repeat, and it worked!  I experimented with different colours, not very sophisticated because in the time frame I didn't make colour separations on layers. The painter in me really loves the nuances of texture and colour, but I know they will not reproduce well when printed on cotton or other textiles. It's a cute design, though. I thought of them as being kind of elephant creatures, but was reliably informed when I posted them on Instagram that they are possums! A Google search revealed that they do, indeed, resemble possums although they could do with loner toes.  Lovely strong shmoosie blues here, but because of the transparency and texture of my 'riso' attempt the possums look a bit dirty and tonally it's all a bit wrong.
Thanks for reading. see you next time!  There's nothing like a Valentine's card to say Spring will come around again soon. I designed this for Instagram and sent it to B.
 We have so many friends whose birthdays fall between November and January that it has become an annual ritual to make birthday cards as soon as the Christmas cards are done, and it is free licence to mess about with every craft material in the studio (hem, spare room) plus anything I can purloin from B's shed. This year the hot glue gun came in extremely useful.
Looking at these birthday cards laid out together drying, I thought this would make a lovely pattern. It's been a while since I did some pattern-making, so that's something to look forward to for the new year, if not sooner. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!  Clipping masks (not face-masks for a change) became an obsession last week when I realised how beautifully different papers and textures sit together in a patchwork resembling a quilt. The scope for experimentation on just one set of shapes is literally infinite, and collecting and collating scans for them is an exciting process.  This ‘Sunday’ illustration uses a bird I drew earlier in the year, together with a garland I painted last year. I deconstructed the bird into separate layers in Procreate, and spent some time working on the garland so I could play around with overlaying a variety of scans. Here, collaged together, are patterns from my sketchbooks, some of the gouache paintings from last week’s entry, a collection of painted textures also from my sketchbooks, pages from vintage books, and a map of Canada (random!)
Thanks for visiting, see you next week!  These two patterns were spin-offs from the second (blue) drawing in my last entry. Working in Procreate allows for a lot of freedom and experimentation with sets of shapes and colours, and it’s very satisfying to be able to produce new works relatively quickly. I say relatively quickly, but a lot of time this week went into designing the little birds - but I’m sure I will use them again in different works!   At last, I am starting to edge my way back into work. It looks as though our Perthshire house sale is on again. At the weekend we had a great visit from friends we haven’t seen since before lockdown. The household suddenly settled into a more regular regime, and all of a sudden I found myself with some time to work in the afternoon yesterday and today. Sometimes it’s hard to drop back into the swing of work. Re-opening projects which have been lying for 5 or 6 weeks can be daunting - what was the train of thought? How did I do that? - it can be overwhelming. So, I always find the antidote in a good dose of pareidolia to loosen up! The other day it rained hard overnight, but in the morning the sun was up and so hot I knew it would be drying the pavements in the park leaving picturesque watermarks. On our daily walk with the dog I took snaps with my phone which are proving to be a mine of inspiration ...  ... Here we have, top: weird sun-god creating constellations from the sea, and above, a hiker. Below are the original snaps I took in the park.  I nearly forgot to mention, I got a new stylus this week: I bought an Adonit Dash3. I use an old iPad (2014, 2ndGen) as well as a Samsung Galaxy mini phone, and an iPhone. This stylus works brilliantly on all. Previously I had two Heiyo styli; the first one was about 18 months old when the on/off switch cover fell off, following the plug charger cap which fell off almost immediately after purchase. I replaced the stylus with a new one, and that suddenly stopped working after just two months; I literally put it down to go to fetch a cup of tea and when I came back it had just stopped working. Nothing had changed on iPad. I switched back to the old one, which for all its faults worked fine for a couple of months until it, too, suddenly stopped working in mid-project. Tech support was infuriating so after some research I got the Adonit Dash3 and it is excellent! Smooth, instantly works etc etc. Nice nib for drawing and writing. Should have done that when the first Heiyo failed. Note and NB!!: it doesn't work on iPadPro.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Welcome to my illustration blog! I usually post here on Wednesday, sometimes adding extras to keep a work journal.
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. Currently I am working on illustrating a children's book, pattern making, and setting up a Spoonflower shop. I hope you enjoy your visit! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I keep lots of scrapbooks and sketchbooks where I develop ideas and design little creatures. Here's a peek inside one ...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 2022
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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 ...
|
RSS Feed
