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!