The bathroom window is old, old as the house. Its pattern is ubiquitous, common to many buildings in the land, but presents something new every day. Gaze at the puffly cushions in each pane, find ice cream cones, fists, flowers, constantly changing as light passes through them. Today cartoon raindrops cascade from glass clouds.
It's Christmas- and birthday-card making season, which I always enjoy. An excuse to get out all sorts of crafting materials and have fun with rubber stamps, stick things together with the hot glue gun, play with spangles, blob around with paint and generally increase the peace. I never have a single idea what I'm going to do at the beginning, but something always happens. I began completely empty headed, but as soon as all the bits and pieces came out and I started playing with them the cards made threw themselves together. It's so satisfying to see the neat rows of finished, folded cards.
I photographed these crystals - in our scullery sink, of all places. A bleach solution had drained away, leaving a residue which dried into these beautiful crystalline forms. It reminded me of a photo (or possibly a contact print) my Dad used to have lying around; he had made if from of the bottom of a developing tank he used for his photography in the early 1970s. Sadly, that print appears to be lost now. As a child I thought at the time that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had marvelled at the intricacy of the crystals in their feathery forms, for years mistakenly thinking it was a photo of ice on a window.
How could something as mundane as a cleaning product flower so spectacularly? Today, from a yellow plastic Asda container had emerged pale, ephemeral gardens of constellations, skies of wonder, caves of stalactites and stalagmites - a genie in the bottle. Is this a form of efflorescence? I hope so, because in French the word means ‘flowering out’, and that to me is exactly has happened here. As bleach is diluted sodium hydrochloride, I am guessing once most of the water emptied from the sink, the rest evaporated away leaving these beautiful salt crystal deposits. I was photographing some of the templates diary work during the week when I noticed I was getting good images of some used carbon paper. I had been drawing templates through it to get that particular blue line, which somehow manages to be crisp and fuzzy at the same time; also, I love that particular blue colour. After the sheets of carbon have been used over and over I had noticed the shiny side becomes an intricate lace of inverse lines left by pressing through the back with a biro to transfer the line onto paper. I have tried so many times to capture it - scanning, fancy lighting, getting close up with the camera, but to no avail - no detail showed up at all in the images.
I had cut template shapes from the used carbons for some compositions in the diary, and these were amongst the photos I took this week. The natural light of summer was so good I saw that at last I had managed to capture those elusive lines! They were so interesting I brought them into Procreate on my iPad, cut them out, and composed this image - maybe an idea for a painting? The other day I was playing around with a grille composed of Old West lettering again, I placed it over one of my drawings to see how it would look. It does have a feeling of looking outside from within. I was most interested in the shapes created between the letters, coloured around in black to isolate them.
I spotted this fantastic example of four different systems crossing each other while out on our daily walk: the plant, its shadow, woodgrain, and saw-marks on a felled tree. Of course I didn't have a phone or camera with me, so when I got home I got my phone and returned to the scene. It was worth it both to have collected this image which I find deeply interesting, but I also met a beautiful little pug pup - his body was pale sandy coloured, with a black face.
After another week of howling storms, sleet, hailstones, thunder I am actually sitting here today posting this is dazzling bright sunshine.
I don't title all of these templates works, but as on the week ending 2 February this week was another when titles suggested themselves. Reading left to right: 1. Planetary Model 1 2. Pisces (B's star sign) 3. Lute 4. Clockwork 5. Planetary Model 2 6. Taurus (my star sign) Here is an amusing thing about titles in the diary: the working titles going around in my head often sound like pub names when you read the facing pages together, e.g. the Lute and Swan, or on other pages the Pot and Puzzle and the Harp and Arrow. I don't know what that says about me ... Thanks for visiting, see you next week! This week's 6 template drawings using my Dad's old templates, and 6 great things about this week:
1. My lovely bestie flew in from Germany, we have had some great chatty drinks in the evenings. He's not getting any shorter, he seems to be about 6ft 7 these days! (I could be the shrinking one, of course). 2. Back to Binky illustration work on an ongoing project which I am determined to have finished by Easter at the latest. It's a children's book which is top secret until it has been released. 3. The sun is now rising earlier every day - easier to get out of bed! 4. Working page layouts in BookWright, I love that kind of work. It brings out the old graphic designer in me. 5. Stunning frosty mornings with bright sunshine. 6. I am really enjoying collecting templates in my diary, discovering invisible forms. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! This time last year I began to play with the idea of using templates in my drawings. I had inherited a lot of technical templates after my Dad passed away in 2017, some of which he made himself. He was a leading draughtsman and naval architect, and no doubt would find a great deal of humour in the sense I try to make of his tools. I find the forms fascinating and like the idea of using them in ways they were not deigned to be used. I want to incorporate them into my work combined with unreadable text and make them into plans nobody can build, and allow them to convey a sense of joyous unknown logic. The idea of working with cut spaces, or missing forms, is appealing to me. I used a few templates in my Confused Flags recently, and look forward to taking the idea further in 2020. This Christmas has provided rich pickings for new forms: the image on the right is the remains of a miniature build-a-car car kit after the car parts had been pressed out. To the left, a notebook containing early template experiments I made a year ago, The notebook itself is an interesting Duplicate Manifold Book, supplied by the government for Public Service (in the 1960s by the looks of it), also found amongst Dad's possessions. I was a bit disappointed that the duplicate function doesn't work any more, but once or twice I inserted a piece of carbon paper to see what would happen when a drawing duplicates in a different medium.
To see the finished car kit model photo visit The Weekly at Binky McKee. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! I cracked open a brand new Moleskine notebook this week, and I realise yet another good reason to use them: they lie flat when open, making it easier to photograph pages for social media. I don’t know how long mine will open out flat because I glue papers, scraps, collages and experiments in my notebooks and they tend to become bulky in time. I have a lot of notebooks with empty pages in the back because I can’t fit anything else in without bursting the covers. Three drawings this week: a Peruvian gourd which rattles when shaken, an enamel doggy box which is partner to the one I drew last week, and a depiction of the inside of a favourite bowl, but flattened out. I worked by turning the bowl in my hand and allowing the pattern to run straight in my drawing.
Word play in every sense. This is an inexpensive notebook I bought from Asda; I like the paper because it suits the pressure I use when I draw, and because it isn't precious I'm not scared to use it (Moleskines can be a bit intimadating!) I am as comfortable as a child when drawing in notebooks this way. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! This week has been all about flowers and pattern making over at Binky McKee, still working hard on setting up a shop on Redbubble. I am absolutely fascinated by pattern-making, but have never learned to do it using the tools in Photoshop until now, and it has been great fun. I became curious to see what my HEW drawings would look like in a repeat pattern, so I mocked up this simple tiled design from a detail of Before There Were Saturdays (2015). I know it's rough, but interesting! I am excited about learning how to do it properly, and the possibilities for making drawings based on pattern. Thanks for visiting, see you next week! Current sketchbook using an old duplicate notebook of my Dad's. It has printed on the jacket: "Supplied for the Public Service, HMSO Code 28-600 Duplicate Manifold Book". The Duplicate Manifold aspect no longer works, but I can put carbon paper in and replicate its original function if I want to. I like the colour and aged quality of the papers in the book: some are white and some beige. Right now I am mixing ideas of my own together with technical templates my Dad used in his plan drawings - it's like throwing ideas into the wind and seeing where they take me. I lost my Dad in 2017, he died on the first anniversary of my Mum's death: two wonderful people, talented and filled with love, together again at peace but always with me. I like to think I can collaborate with them both.
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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. |