In an audacious piece of art theft, I took these roundels from one of my Heather Eliza drawings made on my iPad, and made a pattern from them. Well, I am the same person, after all. For now I have been enjoying the sketchy look of them which would look good printed on smooth paper, but I may at some point make clean, bright versions for textiles in different colourways. The two versions above are exactly as the original, whereas these pictured below have had layers removed and colours and direction changed. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
A few adjustments to colour and tones, and I also found a faulty leaf! It was such a tiny fault on a crossover section of the pattern it may not even have shown up, but I don't leave things which could come back and haunt me later so I fixed it. It took ages to not only to correct a few pixels' worth and put the section into repeat with the rest of the pattern, but to amend all versions of the work I had made so far, going right back to the first outline drawing. I wanted the crows to feature some blue, but I felt the black lines looked too heavy. I tried recolouring the lines but nothing worked well until I went for the partial recolour option above. This is what the layer beneath the main pattern, used for touch-ups and fills for areas too small for colour-drop, looks like - I like its sketchy, painterly look. There's something quite vintage (perhaps 1930s - 40s) which I can image printed on a flowing, soft crepe material.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! The freedom I have to produce different colourways in my crows and berries pattern: above, hot pinks, and below is a work in progress in blues. The blue version above is still in quick block-filled form with a few colour decisions to be made. It is quite a slow process and you may spot some missing white spots around the edges where I need to touch in and refine on a layer underneath the pattern. Also, the black lines on the crows are looking a bit heavy for some reason, something I need to address - but it's getting there.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Today is a double post with my Heather Eliza journal, not something I do very often. However, these chairs started 10 years ago (almost to the day) as drawings in a Heather Eliza sketchbook which I traced this week and featured in my Heather Eliza journal, where I have written a little about how they were originally made. During the week I suddenly had the idea to get a T-shirt made for work with upholstery in-jokes on badly drawn chairs (because I am an upholsterer and seamstress by day) - I thought the lads at work might find it amusing. I remembered the old wonky chair sketches which I thought would be great for the job, and got them out to give them the Binky treatment. Here is a quick attempt at a T-shirt design. I'm a big fan of raglan sleeve baseball T's, so this style is what I would get for myself if I did decide to get one. Here is a suitably upholstery-type cheeky-looking young man modelling my design on my Redbubble: Below is a continuation of the crows pattern I have been revamping, beginning to add colour. It's actually quite slow work, a lot of touching-in has to happen as I go along, but that is over-ruled by the freedom I now have with this pattern to create different colourways. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
At the moment I am still patiently working my way through recreating some of my favourite patterns I made over the last two years in a clear, clean style. I am now able to drop colours to fill the strong outlines, which I can either leave black for a comic book look or 'lose' by making them the same colour as the fill. This process gives me an enormous amount of freedom to use different colourways now, previously I could only change the background colour; and they should print a lot better on fabric than previous versions. The very first version used folksy birds which I still find absolutely charming, but I know from experience its subtlety would be lost on fabric (it may work as a wallpaper printed at high resolution). I dropped the folksy birds in favour of crows, just because I love corvids, but I may make a new version using the folksy birds as well. Here is the new version at the very beginning, tracing my line over a greyscale version of the pattern without any birds at this stage - still a long way to go!
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.
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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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