I spent two days cleaning up my Easter weekend sketchbook work. It was much faster and more interesting to work with than pen and watercolour work, and when I began to play with assembling various elements I was delighted with the bold shapes and clarity. These collaged experiments are rough, but they show me what I need to do next - and I am loving the colours.
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 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! This week I made a pattern from townhouses inspired by Edinburgh terraces. I enjoyed the drawing work, I found plenty of scope for imagination.
Architecture is finding its way back into my work since the house move from rural Perthshire back to Dunfermline town, Fife, where I was born and grew up. I now have familiar views from my work room over lovely houses and an abundance of trees and gardens. My Dad was an architect, and I used to work in his studio during school holidays; I still have many of his architectural plans and drawings. It is interesting that fewer midges, other insects, and plant life are appearing in my work now - it is great fun to introduce them to buildings in drawings (not literally!) 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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