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! Beautiful hot weather got me outside again this week. I capitalised on the fast drying properties of hot sunshine and a light breeze to work quickly to produce a set of textured and patterned papers, using watercolour and rubber stamps. The intent was to use them to create birds, fish, flowers and insects, although I think they would also look lovely as gift-wrap or textiles - I will have great fun playing with them and trying different things out. I have loved to make simple stamps from erasers since school days, when during Latin I used to draw on my rubbers with biro and discovered I could print with them. I decorated all my jotters which gave me no end of delight - ending in lots of pretty jotters, but not a great deal of Latin expertise. I still love to cut erasers into basic shapes for stamping, and I have also had a number of stamps made commercially from my own artworks. The tendril-like spiral stamps in some of the textures above are over 25 years old and still going strong, although not as fine as they used to be. The mandala style stamp I had made up 6 years ago to make Christmas cards, the teardrop Paisley style stamps I bought in a job-lot from a wonderful craft shop we had for a while in Dunfermline, and the brown flower is a stamp I designed for a logo in 1996 to print brown paper bags for my business. All the rest are good old erasers, some of which also date back to the late ‘90s. Some I glued onto wooden blocks which have taken on a lovely inky patina over the years; ooh, I do love a good rubber stamp! Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I began working on lettering for two book illustrations of posters at the beginning of the week. My time was restricted to the evenings this week, because all efforts went into Cupar Arts Eden (I have written more about that on The Weekly at my Heather Eliza website), so I drew on my iPad. I wanted some embellishments for the lettering; once I was happy with the design I had a bit of fun and allowed it to grow beyond the letters all over the image, in a wild garden or Wind in the Willows theme, and played with clouds and patterns, enjoying the invention. After a few days I had built a nice little collection of lettering and patterns and discovered a lot of new ideas.
I also cleaned up an image for a header on my recently resurrected Twitter account @binkysark - enjoying being there again! By the end of the week which had been entirely indoors and digital, it was refreshing to pull out 4 little floral watercolours I painted a while ago. I am interested to see how watercolours on paper interact with lettering, clouds and willowy patterns created on iPad and shall experiment. I promised myself some time in my pop-up tent in the garden painting more flowery paintings influenced by surrounding plant life. That's just fantasy right now, because the weather forecast predicts heavy thundery showers with much surface water and possible flooding later tonight and all day tomorrow. Not really tent weather. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! A succession of hot, sunny days, watering the garden daily and witnessing the exuberance of peony roses, poppies, lily of the valley and all the other joy going on around me proved irresistible. I got out my pop-up tent and set up studio in the garden, the tent covered with a blanket for shade, and painted in the afternoons. These are 4 pages from my sketchbook, the same one as my Easter weekend work in April, when I made a change to my work method and wrote about how, at first, changing the approach to my work made me uncomfortable. I really didn't like it to start with, but now I am loving it.
I trained as a painter at art school in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Chelsea School of Art, London, where I took my MFA in painting. I was represented by a gallery in Covent Garden, and also showed my work regularly in London galleries and at times in Europe. After graduating I had to find work, and it just so happened I ended up in design and applied arts, so drawing became my main focus. It wasn't hard because I love drawing and used to work in my Dad's architectural business during my school holidays; at school we were taught to draw in the William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley tradition. I also enjoyed the purpose of design. Drawing is, of course, the backbone of my Heather Eliza work. The duality in my work methods was what prompted me several years ago to make a clear division and illustrate under the name of Binky McKee, with license to be as decorative as I wanted. At first I didn't really understand what I was doing and there were, naturally, a few crossovers between my Heather Eliza drawings and Binky work; but over time the divide widened. My Easter weekend work experiment of not filling in a drawn outline has widened the divide further as my instincts as a painter come into play. It is a strange fact that the work I was making digitally last year in Procreate first reawakened my old painterly instincts. I was thrilled by what I could do when I got the app on my iPad, and it is still invaluable to me. I don't use line at all when I work digitally, but build illustrations in exactly the same way as I used to paint. I am still working on a children's book in this way, often incorporating hand painted images. Now my painterly instincts are wide awake once more - I might even make a whole painting on paper one day, rather than just design elements! Thanks for dropping by, see you next week! If you would like to see my drawings you are welcome to visit my website at Heather Eliza Walker. This week I have been absorbed with making a summery pattern, based on a watercolour I painted a month ago. When it was finished I had experimented with it (see March 17 entry) but set it to one side because there was a lot of work to do before it could be made into a proper pattern; problems with strong stripes and diagonals, empty spaces and lack of flow in particular were troubling. However, I got it out again last weekend and had a closer look, saw potential, and decided to give it some time and see what I could do with it.
It took all week working on it every day, with much more time in cleanup than I would normally like, because when I painted it I wasn’t really thinking about pattern-making. It presented challenges which I enjoyed, together with a few panic attacks worrying that I was wasting my time; but it had a quality that made me persevere and finally, this evening everything fell into place and here it is in 4 pastel colourways. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I made a return to working with my hands this week, as opposed to digitally!
Procreate on iPad was a miracle during the house move, requiring no space or materials other than a stylus and a charger which enabled me to continue to work and generate new ideas (when there was time). I created some digital work which I find truly wonderful - see last week's post. At the beginning of this week, however, I was struggling with it. In the end I became aware that I was trying to replicate my freehand drawing methods and it wasn't working for me. I tried every brush and everything the digital brushes could do, but I was going silently mad in the process. I know there are artists out there who effortlessly produce work in Procreate and create their own brushes to suit, and I can't tell the difference between their digital and hand-made works, but I was spending hours - days and hours - and getting frustrated and wasting time producing hellish, ugly, stiff, overwrought works. In the end I thought that was nuts. My studio is well enough organised now to be able to work by hand and get it into Photoshop. I set up my room so I have a drawing table and a Mac table with a large enough monitor to finish hand drawn and painted work for Redbubble merchandise, so here is what I came up with: a floral watercolour which became a very lovely pattern, a home-made rubber stamps design (ditto), and a cyan line drawing of a spaced-out cat in a garden which I don't know yet what will become. I will continue to work in Procreate, it is an amazingly powerful tool for iPad and I enjoy using it. I have created many works over the past year, discovering fascinating ideas which I wouldn't have happened without it (see previous posts!). But I have to say it was lovely to get out the pens, pencils and watercolours again, too. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! PS I will be linking to my Redbubble shop, it just doesn't have very much content yet! |
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Welcome to my illustration blog, where I share what I have been up to during the week.
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 - about 40 of them during her 94 years of life. Given that, I have no idea how Doggie with his dead-pan expression became my avatar instead of a cat - something to do with popularity on Instagram and lots of jokes with him! Currently I am working on illustrating a children's book, pattern making, and of course I can't resist a good Instagram challenge such as Folktale Week or Inktober. 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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March 2021
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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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