Once again trick-or-treating was only virtual this year with rising Covid cases, but I was delighted to see our local young families dressed to the nines having an outdoor Hallowe'en met-up in our communal grove. Even the youngest baby was fierce in a lion costume in his witch-mummy's arms with proud swashbuckling pirate dad at her side, and there were all sorts of dinosaurs and monsters! So here are my own little trick-or-treaters wishing everyone a Happy Hallowe'en, quite a motley crew to turn up on your digital doorstep. I had great fun making them into a rogue's gallery, too. Thanks for visiting, see you again soon!
Still collecting colour ideas for my school days pattern, playing with limited palettes on selected motif sections and also trying out different colours for the line work, often mixing them up with some of my character drawings like this juggling panda. They add interest to a sketchbook page. The old school days pattern is now bouncing into life in full glorious technicolour! I have three colourways on the go, and thanks to a sleepless night I got a bonus pattern out of it when I started working with some of the motifs I separated. I know a lot of people who jigsaw puzzle on a sleepless night, pattern making is my jigsaw. If I can't sleep, I pattern. It's so absorbing it drives out those scary middle of the night thoughts like why is the Universe and does it have a pattern and if it doesn't, how do we handle the chaos without starting religious wars. I love how jolly this looks, and it really has that 1970s authentic look because the original was made in the 70s, in my teens when I was so into the style, as I still am but have forgotten a lot about it. Would my schoolgirl self ever have thought I would still be working with this nearly 50 years later? Maybe! I'm still the same person, after all, and just about old enough to be my own granny. Okay, it's getting weird now, so I'm going -
Thanks for visiting, see you soon! These two little bears I drew earlier in the week look so dorky they made me think of space cadets. Something must have crept in unconsciously, because at the time I hadn't realised what a big space week lay ahead ... On Wednesday William Shatner, Star Trek's beloved Captain James T. Kirk, blasted into space at the age of 90 aboard Blue Origin's NS-18 suborbital flight of the New Shepard spacecraft. Looking out of the window he had an overwhelming vision: the Earth teeming with life, in contrast to the deathly span of space. He commented: "We need to take care of the planet, but it's so fragile. There's this little tiny blue skin that is 50 miles wide, and we pollute it, and it's our means of living." (Video and article on Space) Shatner's (or should it be Captain Kirk's?) comments have been hailed as an 'ode to planet Earth'. I'm not surprised, there is poetry everywhere in this. As if this wasn't enough, yesterday satellite Lucy was launched on a mind-blowing mission to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids in search of clues as to how planets formed at the beginning of time as we know it. The asteroids are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets. (Article and animation at Nasa) Apparently the satellite will never come back to land on Earth, it will just fly around in orbit for 100,000 years. I'm not sure if that is fascinating or really, really scary. As for these two, back on Planet Earth, I'd love to know what that cat just said to the bear! Cat is clearly huffy and the bear offended. I don't know how these expressions get onto some of my characters, but put together they form a most comedic narrative.
Thanks for visiting, see you again soon! The weather has been so dark and rainy this week the light was too poor to get much drawing done, so I spent more time than usual working on my iPad. The flat and even qualities of my recent pattern-making work is inspiring and I played some more with putting flat elements over grungy textures, and this is what happened. For a long time I have wanted to develop some little characters from a pencil drawing of a group of toys and cats in one of my sketchbooks. I thought I had lost it, but I was delighted when I found it safe and well back in April, and thought to use these little bears to inhabit the flowers and talk. The way I lettered the word 'lost' at first looked a bit like 'toast' which I thought was funny, so in no time I had this pair - from wistful to a fistful! What I enjoyed working with the bears was finding the best way to keep the feel of the original pencil drawing. After a few false starts this turned out to be to separate each creature in Procreate and draw directly onto it. Some of the original drawing on paper still shows through, which provides a lovely ground of texture and varying tone. This way I was able to firm up and clarify ideas in the original drawing while keeping the innocence of pencil marks. I am looking forward to see how it looks when I eventually remake the original drawing in colour.
I also finished the outline work for the 'collaboration' with my younger self this week, tidying up and adding new elements. There are no spaces left there now, and the pattern fits nicely - more on that later when I start adding colour. Thanks for visiting, see you soon! Continuing the clean theme, I began a 'collaboration' with my younger self. A few years ago I was delighted to find an old design I had made in school. It must have been 1972-3 because at the bottom of the sheet there is a small pencil note: "Heather Walker 2 G 2"; I would have been 12 or 13 if that means form 2 at school, although I seem to recall being a little older when the design was made into a batik cushion cover. Here is a detail of the original drawing from all those years ago. I have wanted to work with it for some time, and started copying it in the Yay Flowers cut-out collage style earlier this year, but it didn't work. It didn't want to be drawn like that and looked dated in the wrong kind of way, somehow lacking a fondness for the nostalgia of the 70s which surprised me, because I thought Yay Flowers looked quite 70s. I like the glow and all the textures of Yay Flowers, but perhaps I was already moving away from that grungy texture I was using last year and that's why it didn't work. I had a feeling it could just look dirty in print even back then. As soon as I began tracing in Procreate with a smooth, clear outline all the fun came back. I had fun separating a few of the main motifs and experimenting with flat colour; now it looks 70s in the right way, with a clean and contemporary feel. I do like the juxtaposition of the flat line and colour work against grungy textures, but I know it wouldn't print well on Spoonflower so the final pattern will have a flat background. The thing to bear in mind is that fabric has its own texture and there's little need to add more, and when I am designing for a pattern I have to stop thinking like a painter and not make 'drawings of textiles', something I have done lots of times because of my interest in them - see September 2020, a month when that's almost all I did.
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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