It's been a while since I drew any cute creatures, so in a brief break from pattern-making I drew this cute kitten sitting amongst flowers with a big jolly sunshine looking down on her. The kitten is a pareidolia image I saw in my bedroom curtains.
Well, this totally sorted out my problem with the ponies. I found the original texture I used in Yellow Bear and overlaid a clipping mask on the ponies drawings. It's interesting to see the clip mask applied to the first brush drawings of the ponies. I know it is very close-toned and painterly, but I'm much happier with this result.
Odd how things develop sometimes - it must be a mood thing. By the way, I'm reworking the leaping doggie/faun creature avatar I was using prior to the birdy one in temporary use at the moment - watch this space. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! A pony emerged from the photos of crumpled up leaves on the pavement I took a couple of weeks ago, and quickly turned into three ponies in a field. At first I had them standing on a speckled green background, great colour combination, but it wasn't gelling particularly well with me. To be absolutely honest, I wasn't really feeling it at first and found it difficult to get into this. It was rather disappointing, because I had been looking forward to allocating some time to making some pareidolia drawings again; I had been going so strongly with it last time and having a lot of fun on a roll with it. Perhaps the new photos didn't inspire the same creative charge, or perhaps it was because at first I couldn't remember which Procreate brushes I had been using which made it all look a bit wrong. Maybe my mood wasn't the same as before, which I think may have been the most likely explanation, as I found my thoughts being drawn towards this little illustration of a yellow bear I made four years ago. I never did anything with this work, I didn't post it anywhere, just quickly named it Yellow Bear, filed it away out of sight, and forgot about it. I found it unsettling at the time and had to force myself not to delete it. This was probably because at the time I was heavily into developing a way to make patterns without automated software on my iPad, and this bear staring out at me lit by flashlight suddenly came out of nowhere. I remember it happening at around 5am on a cold, dark March morning (it almost created itself) and it sort of scared me - these things happen, all part of the creative process.
I discovered I still had the bear illustration a couple of years later, after I had forgotten all about it. I have taken the odd look at it now and again since, and wondered why I had almost discarded it. Maybe I just wasn't ready at the time, confused by the different ideas which emerged in the work, and simply taking myself too seriously. Today I'm so glad I didn't delete it, because now I have decided I really like my stary yellow bear and sought it out for inspiration this week. It wasn't until I set the ponies on the same background as I used for the bear that something began to happen and they came to life; I'm now thinking that instead of the crayon-like drawing style I was using previously for pareidolia drawings I might prefer to work in the same way as I made the bear. It would be quite a different approach to making pareidolia images, perhaps more in line with my feelings at the moment. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! We have had some frosty mornings which left interesting deposits once the ice had melted away. I have seen lovely suggestive images in the residue - I'm thinking some new pareidolia drawings might be on the way!
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! At the beginning of the week, I really wanted to hurry spring along when we had a beautiful burst of sunlight and calm between storms. I noticed that the sea crests I was working with the week before suggested a rhythm or even a pattern, so I created this riverside scene with spring flowers and swallows. It's just a sketch at the moment, but it shows promise when arranged in a brick repeat (I'm a huge fan of those), so I may be working it into a nice clean pattern for reproduction in the near future. Then the winds came in in big, blustery gusts - far too violent to be flying kites, but it did put me in mind of lovely breezy days on the hills with our kites as youngsters. Above is a work I created called 'Kite Party' with pareidolia critters last year, but I never resolved it or posted it anywhere; so I got it out again, refreshed it with a lovely green hillside (with polka dots, of course), and rejigged some of the critters - and here we have a celebration of breezy (not hurricane) weather. It was actually so windy the dog was terrified during the stormy nights, and we had to move her bed further away from the fireplace where she usually sleeps because of the wind booming in the chimney. I personally love that sound, so cosy, but it did get rather loud and scary at times. Now, I have been moving back into pattern-making mode recently. I found the kites from the 'Kite Party' illustration very interesting. I separated them from the rest of the work, made clean drawings which should print well, and arranged them in a brick repeat. I actually really like this, in fact I fancy the grey-green colourway in the middle as wallpaper for our downstairs loo.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Catfish for Caturday, I thought why not? In a week which has been rather slow and uneventful (spring cleaning has begun, and the Christmas decorations are still locked away in an upstairs room for repairs before heading loftwards) it was rather nice to think out of the box.
Monday: I performed my yearly ritual of drawing up charts of sunrise and sunset times to see just how much more daylight we have since the winter solstice. I calculated 1 hour and 3 minutes, but by the time I write this journal entry it will be even more, as we are steadily gaining 4 minutes and counting every day. Tuesday: the first day of February is here! It's a great month, as the sun gets brighter and higher in the sky. There are shoots coming up all over the garden, and I dream of all the lovely flowers we will have. Wednesday was Candlemas, a day I really like; the thought of blessing candles is wonderfully Gormenghast - I can visualise some strange ancient ceremony of the Groan family being conducted in the castle. The best thing, though, is arranging garden snowdrops in a posy vase and lighting lots of candles, celebrating the lighter days and higher angle of the sun. (I took some photos of our snowdrops and posted them on my HEW blog). Thursday and Friday were about getting organised. My work room is cluttered with some Christmas decorations which were taken down on twelfth night. While most went back into the loft, others required packaging materials, replacement parts, and a bit of mending before they join the others the loft, so a couple of Amazon orders were required. I feel the need to get my room back! Saturday saw the completion of the second stage of the cover artwork for the children's book I have been illustrating, also this week; next week will be the third stage, and maybe the final. For fun in the evenings I often play about with my pareidolia creatures, making up little visual stories as I introduce them to one another. I made the one pictured above this week, and this one below a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
Synchronised flying! I became very interested in this collage when the birds suddenly became a pattern in the landscape, it's a novel combination. I'm sure it's got something to do with living beneath the flight-path of geese crossing the sky to and from a local nature reserve. They form huge skeins and the air is full of their chatter and gabble as they pass over, a beautiful thing indeed. The geese here are one of my pareidolia finds in damp patches on paths on the park.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Revisiting pareidolia drawings and the south east coast of Fife, this work is typical of a trip to the fishing villages at this time of year - little cars parked on the front, probably sheltering people inside with flasks of soup and sandwiches, or perhaps eating delicious fish and chips bought from the local shops, looking out over a rainy River Forth.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! This week I reconstructed Dog Days Friday, pictured below. It was the only one of the series of seven artworks which I either didn't save as a PSD file or lost, the only record I had was a screenshot of its Instagram post. It involved quite a lot of rummaging around in my archives to gather together all the constituent parts, but seeing artworks I had forgotten inspired the little scene above: some pareidolia creatures putting on a play. On the subject of Instagram, this Friday I was interested to read Lisa Congdon's thoughts on how Instagram has changed over the last 10 years, which totally echos my feelings in so many ways. She was in the vanguard of Instagram from day one (over ten years ago). Today she has made nearly 11,000 posts with a following of 442k. By contrast I made my 458th post today, consider myself blessed to have 707 followers, and didn't join Instagram until 2014 when I got my first iPhone - but even on such a modest scale I have experienced the same disappointing changes. I have written a bit more about it on Heather Eliza's blog.
Visit Lisa Congdon's website and shop - she really is some kind of superwoman! Must try harder ... Thanks for visiting, see you next week! This morning I was getting Instagram and blog images ready for posting when, poking around in Procreate, I saw this collection of creatures in one document close by my 'digital sketchbook', a collage of textures spread like pages I put together back in February. It was a complete coincidence, I had only imported the sketchbook document the other day to look for something unrelated to the beasties. The two images were talking to each other so well I thought to put them together, and loved the result. The dark background is the original pavement photo I originally set the collection of beasties against last week which I liked well enough, but this is so much more fun! The colours and textures work off one another so well, a chance encounter has become quite a new favourite.
Thanks for visiting, see you next week! There has been a lot of pareidolia in Binky world, including this man wearing a bowler hat on a bicycle amusing a pony riding by riding with the handlebars back to front - it can get a bit surreal in this world of the imagination!
I've been working ahead of myself this week to collect together a few images while I begin a new body of drawings (see my Heather Eliza journal) and I'm not sure how much visual story-telling I can do at the same time as developing these. Normally I can switch quite easily between illustration/pattern-making and my drawings, but beginning new work requires total focus until I feel my way into it. Once I know where new work is going I can begin to switch about again and regain a balance between the two practices, and the pleasure and interest in each resumes and they jog along side by side. There is of course always the fear that I'll forget how to do the other thing while I'm focusing on the new, whichever way the switch is, but it's usually still there waiting for me when I get back into it. Hopefully. You know us artists, so full of self-doubt and imposter syndrome it's amazing we ever get anything done at all. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Sea creatures and birds all in the same place - well, why not. In the combined world of pattern-making and pareidolia these things really don't matter! This new pattern is made from last week's creatures I found in water-stained pavements in the park. Thanks for visiting, see you next week!
Midweek bonus post - I made a pattern from all the pareidolia creatures I have created so far, set in a cloudy sky.
An immense relief to take a break from making artworks which are all digital clicks and numbers! It must be an annual thing, because exactly a year ago I was making works based on scenes I saw in rain-soaked cracks in the park pavements after the sun has burnt off the puddles. Perhaps the rain is just the right sort at this time of year, I know exactly when I'm going to get the best photos which inspire pareidolia. At first it was tough to get going on these, following an extended period of pattern-making and uploads of designs, but it soon came back to me. I wanted to get back into illustration mode because there is still some work to do on that children's book with author Amber Hunt. I made the image at the top first, a mermaid taking her catfish for a swim, for yesterday's caturday hashtag on Instagram; after that the work began to flow freely. These are two interpretations of the same pavement splodge, pictured below, I simply turned it a different way around for each - the mermaid in the first image here, and cheeky little winged doggie in the second. Thanks for visiting, see you next time!
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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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