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! Last week I wrote about flooding the kitchen. This week it was fire. A pork loin steak I was grilling at high temperature exploded and shot a large chunk of fat onto the grill element where it burst into flames, shooting fire upwards into the air where it got fiercer and bigger. The flames then ignited the whole grill tray, and it seemed it was never going to stop, but it burnt itself out once I removed the flaming tray and no harm was done except soot up the front of the oven and a scorched towel. The pork was delicious, by the way. So, water last week, fire this week - what next? Earth and wind - a hurricane of mud, perhaps.
Aside from kitchen incompetence, I did get some work done. I embellished the Happy Days lettering to make it more fun and give it a touch of boho. I am currently working on illustrations which I can’t share yet, but here is a scene depicting an expanse of sky with little puffy rain clouds, a mysterious apparition, and daisies. The main characters and clues as to location etc have been omitted, but I thought there was something special about the way the image stands just like this. I am also developing new hand lettering for the same project, something I love doing; and I began working on a pattern of wands, stars and moons. Until next week, be safe in your kitchens, folks! - and as always, Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I do like a week that starts with a new moon on Monday. It feels like a fresh start, rich in potential for new beginnings and adventures. This Monday was ... interesting. It started with an unintentional mashup of the Happy Days lettering idea I was working on last week. I opened the PSD document with layers in Preview by mistake and saved as a Jpeg, resulting in mangled transparent areas. It has a great 1950s vibe! I then went on to flood the kitchen at lunch time (left a tap running, plug in sink, nipped out to the bins, got distracted, 30 mins later = major flood). At least we had all clean drawers and cupboards, not to mention a spotless floor by the time we mopped up - that's a good new beginning.
On Tuesday I made a sunny composition of poppies and butterflies, thinking it would look good on tote bags. It didn't, but I discovered how to enable Kids' Clothing on Redbubble, which is great because I think a lot of my designs suit children's clothing better than adult. During the remainder of the week I made a new colour palette and reworked the Happy Days lettering. I wanted something cleaner and brighter to really look happy, and here is the result! Hopefully things will settle down now we have passed the new moon, and tomorrow brings the first quarter. No more floods and mashups. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I set to work on the garlands paintings at the beginning of the week, starting with designing compositions with gouache paintings of poppies and butterflies I made a couple of weeks ago. It was lovely work, and I was delighted with the resulting pattern pictured above; I was particularly interested in the woodblock effect of the garlands.
Next, I spent a couple of days designing lettering, with the aim of making cards and stickers - it was enormous fun playing around with various layouts, and I really got into it! I am looking forward to getting them into my shop 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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