It felt strangely familiar when I was drawing its shadow, and I thought it would be interesting to show my original artist's impression of the design for the forge, but unfortunately I couldn't find it in time before posting today - if I come across it I'll post it next week.
The photo I posted last weekend of the shadow cast by a wrought iron table in our garden interested me so much I couldn't resist drawing it: the tilt and strange perspective, shadows on the patio, and lichen patterns wandering across stony textures proved irresistible to my mind. The table is one I designed for my shop back in the '90s, a prototype for the Provençal range of dining furniture hand-forged by Stan Pike which became a best seller for the business (and also got ripped off by someone photographing the window display, and copies turned up later in Prague). I didn't have the prototype powder-coated, and it wasn't designed to be outside so mine has rusted in the garden, expressed by the brown colour in the drawing above. The finished dining sets were available finished in a clear coat to show the beauty of the natural metal, or in customised funky colours to suit clients' interior design specs.
It felt strangely familiar when I was drawing its shadow, and I thought it would be interesting to show my original artist's impression of the design for the forge, but unfortunately I couldn't find it in time before posting today - if I come across it I'll post it next week. Recently I have been noticing the way things talk to one another, especially when they are not related but an accidental link somehow matches them together. Here is a juxtaposition of a wonderful shadow cast by our round table in the garden and a sewing test on a scrap of upholstery material from work. I always test with wavy lines - well, it's more fun than a straight line, isn't it? and I spotted an oval in this one similar to the table's shadow, with echoes of the verticals and curlicues in the photo. And before I go, here is an update on the alfalfa progress this week - look at them go! We're going to eat them soon, so I quickly took this pic before they're all gone.
Summer has suddenly arrived with warm weather and enough rain to give us a lot of work in the garden. B built a lovely big raised bed for veg last week to add to his vegetable patch, and we are spending a lot of time outdoors while the weather is good. My full time job is very busy at the moment, too - so not a lot of time left for artwork, but here is a very quick sketch of some indoor gardening - sprouting seeds. Alfalfa sprouts are so delicious in a sandwich, I was delighted when we found some seeds in our local garden centre and B got to work on them. He grew some in soil which produced tasty little cress-like greens, but these seeds are in a jar of water, rinsed with fresh water every day and kept in a dark drawer to magically come to life. Swimming about in fluid, these sprouts do indeed look like the very beginnings of life.
A second idea I had in mind for the earth section of this drawing was to fill the strata lines with energised red darts flowing upwards into the flower section. When I was a youngster (and sometimes still to this day) I used to fancy I could see red energy shooting through the trunks and branches of trees. I had temporarily removed the large petal to the right of the flower head, but liked the ghostly transparent shading which remained. It had occurred to me that plants are more than part earth, part flower - they are also of the air, especially when their seeds float off, dressed in fairy costumes. I liked the way the ghost petal puffs airily across the linear work so I included it. I also remembered a collage I made in January 2021 with a big trumpet shooting out of a flower, and had liked its ridiculous humour, so I added something similar to this version. When I had finished the bulb section beneath the flower head I didn't like the way it looked with the crossed over leaf stems, a hangover from the original Voynich manuscript which worked fine in the first version of the drawing (finished version below). The red darts made the cross section resembled laces on a dance shoe, or the waistcoat of a lady Highland dancer - not what I had in mind at all. An amended version of the drawing made the section into a more organic affair, with leaf shoots peeling out of the bulb itself instead of crossing over it. I recognise the fact that this isn't exactly dynamic blogging, the image hardly changing from post to post, but, hey - art is like that sometimes.
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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. |