Our neighbours' daughter had her 16th birthday at the beginning of the week and it was about time I made some more cards for such occasions - so I got to work cutting and folding enough cards to last us the year. Working on greetings cards is a great excuse for trying out things I wouldn't normally do, but when I sat down to make something my mind went blank. I turned to a few little compositions I was making in Procreate last May for inspiration, and this is what happened - it came out looking like traditional Scottish painting. Not surprising really, because it was an obsession of mine while at Gray's in Aberdeen. Something about Ben's birthday brings out the monster in me! Not sure why, but last year I made him a monster popup card and this year it's a reversible card of ... monsters. There is no back or front, so Ben can chose whichever side to have on view - two cards in one. I think Ben likes monsters - I hope he does, anyway. He is a YouTuber specialising in gaming videos, not something I'm au fait with, but I know he has a taste for the ghoulish and creepy. Not that my monsters are particularly either of those things, they look far too friendly and benign, and in fact these ones were inspired by children's chalk drawings I saw on the local primary school playground when out walking the dog. The rain soon came along and washed them away but my favourites were captured in my imagination - not as wild and reckless as I remember the children's ones, and it was harder than I had supposed to capture the spirit (hence all the over-painting) but so much fun and I do love them! (I wonder if I could make a pattern from them?)
Thanks for looking, see you soon! The exuberance of spring, and my workroom warming up enough to sit in there for longer than 3 minutes resulted in the annual burst of joy at getting back to real materials! See March and April of last year. I started on a few watercolours during the week. It wasn't that easy to find my groove after a few months of digital-in-the-dark-days work, but after a couple of false starts the ease and looseness began to flow. I am also experimenting with something new to me: working watercolour together with coloured pencils. I have always been more of a gouache girl. Still working on iPad before it gets completely light in the mornings, I also finished this camping pattern with colourful teepees, an idea I have had in the background for a couple of weeks. I am enjoying compiling these collages of my work from the week and posting them on my Instagram. I am using lots of bright new colours right now, which I love - it's great to lighten up. Here we have watercolours, dots and teepees from the week alongside weekend revisiting work from last year - and a new profile pic.
Thanks for visiting, see you soon! Some sunshine yellow to welcome in the merry month of May! I do wish we could have a bit more actual sunshine, it has been bitterly cold here in Fife this week, with very cold nights and some frost in the early morning. Flowers, very sensibly, are refusing to bloom in the real world but are still going strong in my work.
This might be my favourite one of the set of paintings finished last week. I feel the levels of stylisation and naturalism are in good balance, and it has a cosy, friendly feel. The warmth of the colours and texture photograph beautifully in the early evening sun.
The second painting in the series finished this week. I really do love working with texture! The lines drawn over the top are carbon copy paper, chosen not just for its delightful mark-making, but also because I can't see exactly where it's going because it's lying face down on the painting and I'm drawing through the back. The result has an innocence which brings a lot to this work.
These are quite small at 25x18cm, which gives the texture and marks a greater prominence. ... If not in the weather. If spring is going to be slow arriving this year I decided just to bring it on with flowery paintings this week. I like this kind of work to suggest tapestry or embroidery, so I used a heavy impasto consisting of acrylic gesso primer bulked out with whiting alongside gouache to create texture. I have tested it for stability and adherence as much as I can and it seems to be fine, it even has flexibility and will bend with the heavy Fabriano print paper I favour without cracking. Adding some dots details finished this piece by the end of the day, when it looked lovely in the low sun. The weather took another turn for the Baltic this week forcing me to move into a warmer room to work - it was productive, though, and very comfortable as my temporary HQs are on a lovely old brass bed. Very handy for hanging work in progress, it began to resemble the railings at Bayswater Road in London on a Sunday! I was saddened to hear yesterday's news of the death of Prince Philip. He was 99 years old, a national institution. Farewell and rest in peace, our Duke of Edinburgh.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I had the best fun making this pop-up birthday card for Beardo Benjo (emminent YouTuber)!
Last week I just happened to stumble across a Zoom make-along with two wonderful women I follow on Instagram. I had no idea how a pop-up card worked and became very interested, just in time to make this monster card for Ben. It was gloriously messy, sticky, painty and I loved it. My thanks to the generosity of: @deborah.j.stein @sara.hand_art.and.wonder @storycampdisco Happy Easter!
We always made drawings of Easter eggs in primary school which were proudly mounted on sugar paper to display on the classroom walls before being taken home for the holidays and presented to doting parents. I used to make so many Easter cards when I was a young girl for my parents, grandparents, my godmother and a couple of other special aunties. They have all passed on now and Easter cards aren't so much of a thing in my life any more, which is rather sad. So this year I decided to recreate those primary school gems from memory and post them on Instagram as Easter cards for everyone! I made three in total to post on Holy Saturday, Easter Day, and Easter Monday. I even made one with a dark brown background in memory of the sugar-paper - whenever it came to my turn for mounting my drawing at school, only the dark brown colour was left. I have been studying and drawing my collection of gypsy purses from time to time since the mid 1990s, perhaps to try and work out why I love them so much. The gouache paintings pictured here pasted into a scrapbook were made back then (long before the days of iPad and Procreate). I painted details of Indian bags and a black papier mâché bowl also from India, bought in the same shop in Cirencester as some of the gypsy purses; and the crackle glaze decoration on a flask which looks Greek - a thrift-shop find in North London, possibly brought to England by a holiday maker, which makes me think of red wine from sun-soaked country vineyards served in a bistro alongside all the colourful, fragrant foods of the Mediterranean. The paintings are fun to use for throwback-Thursday posts on Instagram, and the comparison with today’s digital versions is interesting; rich colours and a fascination with tiny stitched details live on.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! A collage of drawings based on patterns on Japanese Washi tapes. This was so much fun to do, finding ways to apply patterns to household objects and develop related themes to go with them, and it makes me think of mood boards.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I am having a mini-sketchbook binge! Here are some I made previously. I love making pocket-sized booklets. At the moment I am making five consisting of 5 sheets, folded and simply stitched together in the centre with carpet thread (I’m not going to impress anybody with my bookbinding skills here) using Thai Mulberry paper. I have already started with some cat cutouts I made last week, enjoying pasting them onto pages and working them with watercolour and pen. It's a relaxed and free way to develop ideas, and I enjoy the mix of line and textures. This photo shows work in progress: this gives some idea of scale. It's Minnie, my neighbour's cat, rolling around in the garden - as she does!
I am beginning to turn over the idea of doing the 100 Days Project on Instagram with cat drawings. It's a great way to develop work, and I have been most inspired by other artists' 100 days - hence the 5 booklets consisting of 20 pages. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! PS: If you were here earlier in the week, you may have noticed I replaced an image of works in progress with a photo of all my lovely handmade sketchbooks. I have been wanting to show these sketchbooks for ages - and I don't want to give too much away before I start on the #100daysproject! Watch this space! 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. 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.
Monday: I finished the linear flower drawing I was working on during the previous week.
Tuesday: a mock-up for some colour ideas for a pattern. Wednesday: I began work on a coloured version of the linear flowers, painting with gouache. Thursday: I completed the gouache work when it filled the entire sheet of paper. Friday: i played around with different coloured stems and backfill fronds. Then, over the weekend I took scans of some the sprigs in the drawing and cleaned them up. They look pretty and full of character which I like, I am sure they will come in useful. 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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