I've been collecting fluted and ribbed items from around the house, looking for suitable pot suggestions for the plants to inhabit in my drawings. From dainty little egg-cups to Indian carvings in marble and sheesham, I am excited by the differing scales; I have an image in my head of tiny pots next to large ones, which I have begun to explore in the above sketch. In the centre image of the collage below, there is a very large old hand-made ceramic pot which has just always been around. The photo doesn't do it justice, as seen here it could easily be a yunomi - but in fact it measures 25cm in diameter.
There were several nasturtium plants all winding around each other in the garden photo I've been using as a reference point for drawing, but keeping in mind I want to make a composition of crazy plants in fluted pots I started separating individual stems from last week's tangle. Trying to work out what belongs to what was a fun challenge. I sketched this on my iPad using an 'ink bleed brush' with a variable line weight, but its delicacy and lightness is making me want to draw with real ink and brush, or even a fountain pen on paper! I've been collecting fluted and ribbed items from around the house, looking for suitable pot suggestions for the plants to inhabit in my drawings. From dainty little egg-cups to Indian carvings in marble and sheesham, I am excited by the differing scales; I have an image in my head of tiny pots next to large ones, which I have begun to explore in the above sketch. In the centre image of the collage below, there is a very large old hand-made ceramic pot which has just always been around. The photo doesn't do it justice, as seen here it could easily be a yunomi - but in fact it measures 25cm in diameter. I love that pot, but don't know who made it; I remember it originally being in my grandparents' house from the early 1960's when I was a very little girl - so perhaps it was made by a friend of theirs, or maybe a serendipitous junk shop find.
As I worked directly on top of the plant-like elements I had inserted in last week's drawing, I was already replacing them with another idea for wild, manic plants twisting and pushing from fluted pots for the next one. I realised last week's didn't work because there were two different ideas going on in a small drawing: the plant elements were flat and cartoon-like, whereas the fluted forms bear the illusion of three dimensionality - basically, there were two styles of drawing not sitting well together.
This time, with a clear idea of what I want to achieve, I began with a simple line sketch of nasturtiums. It's an idea which began to take root (pun not intended) late last summer, when I photographed fascinating plant activity in some of the weirder areas of the garden - so much stranger and more intriguing than anything I could make up! Truth is stranger than fiction, so this sketch of nasturtiums is based on one of those photos. Above, work in progress. My notes and criticisms can be seen in the margins while I decided this drawing had to be either about the fluted forms, or the wanderings of last week - not both. So I worked directly over the drawing, eradicating which for now is the unwanted wanderings. They will soon come back in another form, where fluted pots and wild plants are in harmony. The ink in an Edding mapping pen (01) was sufficiently dense to cover the drawing made with a Uni Pin 0.05 pen (which, incidentally, got completely used up making this work). The paper is imitation Japanese tissue, inexpensive and good for experiments and tracing, and wrinkles very slightly and delightfully where the marks are dense. So the wanderings of last week have now gone ... I had also been trying to make a 15 x 21cm size drawing from the original notebook sketch; it didn't work (which is why I had wandered and tried adding bits to the drawing to fill the space - it just goes to show you can't fiddle with an original idea). Here it is now looking much happier, the photo cropped down to a proportion closer to the original tiny sketch, only adding a little more dark space above the pots. This part of the sheet now measures 16.5 x 15.5cm.
I also liked the tonality of the notebook sketch, so for the first time I tried out some traditional mark-making using lots of cross-hatching together with the cartoon-style lines I normally use. It's interesting! - quite a range of tone resulted, I like the ghostly effect of the lighter forms against the dark. As I worked I was also thinking of some of my larger drawings with used a dark background, like Before There Were Saturdays. It's important to me right now to create the background with pen rather than painting in a black background, which would have been a lot faster, but wouldn't have had the same movement. I got the printer working (miracle, it's wireless, and will printers ever work first time?) and printed the line drawing I made in Procreate last week. Above is the first stage in pen on semi-opaque paper laid over the print, in my 'portable studio'. The photo looks fuzzy because of shadows cast by the ink drawing over the print. While I was drawing I scribbled a few notes - the foreground pot reminded me of the legs on Gormley's Angel of the North in Gateshead, and I also began to think of umbrellas and other pleated forms. Progress stages above show, top left, a digital version with blacked out background, closely following the original sketch. Top right shows starting to fill the drawing with shading; bottom left shows shading of the outline complete, and the right hand side is just where I wandered with it afterwards. I let it go, although it wasn't what I intended; I wanted to reproduce the original notebook sketch on a larger scale and I'm not sure about the added elements coming from the pots - I had intended focusing on the fluted forms. I'll keep going with this one, though, then perhaps begin again another drawing sticking to the plan.
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Welcome to my work journal - a weekly update on drawings, work in progress, doodles and day-dreaming.
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 heatherelizawalker. with weebly.com and it will work again. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
If you would like to visit my Binky website, please click the picture above. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dissolving PeopleA symbol on the footpath outside a local primary school gradually disappearing as the image breaks up and wears away until eventually it is obliterated by leaves and barely discernible. Photographed at intervals of several months between February 2021 and November 2022, oldest at the top.
(My shoes look so new in the first pic, and note the transition to new phone in the last photo). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
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A 2013 work book, still very much in use Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent. |